I ended up rolling back to XP on my Acer Aspire One.  The boot time was annoyingly slow, and overall the machine felt sluggish.  I made some attempts to minimize the strain by adjusting visual effects for best performance, but that did not make an appreciable difference.  None of this was unexpected.  XP is snappier with a much faster boot and more responsive operation on the whole. 

One issue that I have noticed is painfully slow wireless connectivity.  I fixed this by going into the Device Manager and opening the properties dialog for the Atheros Wireless Network Adapter.  On the Advanced tab I clicked on Power Save Mode and set the Value to "Off".  This lets the wireless connection have its fill of power while running on battery.  As I'm sure you can guess, the downside is that it does in fact use more battery power. 

I received my Acer Aspire One (AAO) this weekend.  As I mentioned before, the first order of business was to reload the operating system.  Loading the OS on this class of device - netbook - requires the use of a USB flash drive if you don't have access to an external CD drive.  You can find a tool called USB_MultiBoot_10 at boot-land.net.  That is the tool referenced in the how-to video I found on YouTube.  Even though I wanted to use Vista, I ran through the process as shown in the video for an XP install to familiarize myself with the procedure.  I made it through without any problems using a 4GB Corsair Flash Voyager.  Next I moved to Vista.  The USB Mulitboot tool allows this as well.  The setup is not as straightforward as XP steps without a video as a guide, but I found this post that made the process clearer.  The steps are laid out in the Aug 30 2008, 11:54 PM post by user 'wimb'.

Drivers

This table shows the drivers you'll need for the AAO:

All the XP drivers can be downloaded from the support section of the Acer site.  As shown above, the Vista drivers are included for the sound card and chipset.  The others worked anyway except for the network, both NIC and WiFi.  I found this post that showed where the Atheros WiFi drivers could be found.  The downloads were slow, but worked.  As the post says, after installing the drivers in the "Install Vista 6120 1009.zip" use the other download files to update the last errant device in the device manager.  Under XP, the touchpad software adds the ability to scroll vertically and horizontally using the edges of the touchpad.  The software will not install under Vista.  One other note: when installing the video driver I was asked whether to install it even though the currently installed version was newer.  If you encounter the same thing yourself you'll notice the version number of the one from Acer is a higher revision.  I continued with the installation.

All that's left to do now is download several hundred megabytes of updates.

I've been wanting a netbook for use around the house to browse the web and watch television.  My wife and I made the switch to HD this past summer.  Since then we only use the television to watch movies because as bad as standard def looks on HD, what comes out of the VCR is worse.  For the few programs that we do watch - Sarah Conner Chronicles, Life, The Office, and eventually Lost and Battlestar Galactica - we catch them online via Hulu.com.  For that and Netflix a netbook looks to be just the ticket.  Also it will be a lot easier to take to China than a full size machine.

I had been pretty wound up about the Dell Mini during the late summer.  I've had a good experience with Dell for all of my work machines.  However, when I saw the specifications and price points for the Mini, not to mention what they did with the keyboard layout I turned elsewhere.  After more reading and comparisons I settled on an Acer Aspire One.  Yesterday I ordered the XP, 1GB RAM, 160GB drive, 6-cell battery version from Buy.com.  I even managed to hunt down a 5% discount coupon.

The first thing I do with any computer out of the box is reload the OS.  This of course makes sure you've rid of any bloat-ware.  The Aspire One doesn't have a CD drive so the OS install requires the creation of a bootable USB stick.  I found a video on YouTube that does a good job of guiding you through all of the steps.  I'm going to prepare the USB stick while I'm waiting for delivery of the machine.  Drivers for the Aspire One can be found on the support section of the Acer site.  I'm also going to give nLite a try.  nLite allows you to create customized installations of Windows.  According to the documentation you can integrate service packs and hotfixes and prevent the installation of unwanted components as well as integrate drivers.  I've never used it before, but this seems like a good opportunity to give it a try.

As I've mentioned before, I started my professional life as a biologist.  Blame it on watching too many episodes of M.A.S.H. for giving me the idea that I wanted to be a surgeon.  I won't waste a lot of time laying out my employment history.  Suffice it to say that after various lab jobs in both industry and academia I made the career change to programming and have been content ever since.  That was about three or four years ago.  Currently I'm the sole programmer in a group working on a patient therapy and outcome registry at the Markey Cancer Center at the University of Kentucky.  As the sole programmer I'm also the lead programmer, which is a lot like being the fastest banana slug. 

As I also mentioned in my earlier post, I've decided to attempt something close to regular posts about what I do and how I do it.  This is the first, and I'm starting off with a post about my equipment.  I'm a laptop-based developer.  I upgraded from a Dell Optiplex GX270 late last year to a Dell Precision M6300.  I was a little wary at first about committing to a laptop, but so far so good.  I've got a 17" screen, 4GB of RAM and a 2.6 GHz Core2 Duo processor.  The graphics card is an nVidia Quadro FX 1600M with 256MB of RAM - more than enough for Aero (which I stopped using).  I have a 5.1 Windows Experience score.  The OS is 64-bit Windows Vista Enterprise.  Over the past week I gave 64-bit Windows 2008 a try because I use a lot of virtual servers and this processor has the virtualization feature that works with Hyper-V.  Ultimately though I returned to Vista.  There is too much friction in daily use to make Windows 2008 worth it for me.  In reloading my OS I remembered a major pitfall I first encountered getting a 64-bit OS working on this machine so I'm going to post my setup procedure here in case anyone else runs into the same issue I did.  I'm also posting other apps and tweaks that I find useful.

The main problem I had during a 64-bit OS install on this machine is that I have to load the SATA driver for the hard disk before I load the OS.  It took me a while to figure that out when I first got this machine (it came with 32-bit Vista Ultimate).  I'd finish the OS load and on first reboot the thing would just sit there with a black screen and a flashing underscore in the top left corner.  The hard drive driver is R154201.  I unzip it in a directory on a USB stick for use in the install routine.  Once the OS is loaded I install the chipset, and the Turbo Memory driver (version A02) then the Matrix Storage driver in that order.  After that I just move through the rest as I come to them: Ethernet, WiFi, System Utilities, sound, graphics, and touchpad.  The touchpad driver (R157048) is nice because it adds the horizontal and vertical scroll features for the edges of the touchpad. 

Applications:

• IIS
• Microsoft Loopback Adapter (for use with Virtual Server)
• Visual Studio 2008
• WordWeb
• Snippet Compiler
• Windows Live Writer - works with DasBlog and Community Server
• Microsoft Office (Excel, Word, Outlook)
• Firefox
• Google Talk and the Google toolbar
• Macromedia Fireworks - yes, the old version from Studio 8
• SQL Server Management Studio
• Virtual Server 2005 R2
• iTunes
• FileZilla
• MagicDisc (for mounting iso's)
• HappyFish (almost forgot that one)

I also include the current releases of Visual Studio add-ons:

• ASP.NET AJAX Extensions 1.0
• Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Templates for Visual Studio 2008
• Microsoft Silverlight Tools Beta 1 for Visual Studio 2008

I used to install Microsearch Color Picker, but it won't install on 64-bit Vista. 

For flexibility I keep my documents on an external hard drive (Iomega) along with backups of my virtual servers which I run off of my hard drive.  I've tried running them off of an external drive but saw no real performance improvement since I'm using an external drive for Visual Studio solutions.  I also have a seed virtual hard drive file for XP, Vista, and Windows 2003.  If I kill one of my servers during an experiment I just delete it and make another copy of the hard drive seed.  The mobility of a laptop combined with Virtual Servers means that I can do my job in the office or at home without interruption.  The dual monitors (20" and 24") on my desk typically make the walk from the parking deck worth the effort though.

Other than this, all I really need to do my job is a network connection so that I can listen to Radio Paradise and a strong cup of coffee around noon.