Last week I discussed my latest purchase - the new Acer Aspire One. I first installed Windows XP however found that it ran fairly slowly. Applications such as Firefox were especially bad taking upto 30 seconds to load certain web pages. Firefox would often go into 'jelly' mode where the application would hang for 5-10 seconds at a time.

After a couple of days with XP I reinstalled the default OS, Linspire. This ran a lot quicker than XP however left much to be desired. Even after performing several tweaks and enabling advanced mode I still felt that the Aspire One could do a lot more.

At the weekend I purchased a Three USB mobile broadband package for £5/month (check out the deals forum). This worked fine in Linspire however a number of things including the speed were frustrating me.

I decided to slipstream a copy of Windows XP using nlite, the application allows you to remove any unwanted components of XP, install drivers and service packs. I created a Windows XP ISO with all the drivers I needed, service packs, IE7 and removed all the unwanted parts of the OS.

The Acer Aspire One 110 comes with an 8gig solid state disk (SSD), while this is as fast as a hard drive to read from, writing is considerably slower. When viewing a web page in Firefox it caches all the files on the disk, this slow writing process causes the 5-10 seconds of jelly mode.

The fix for this is to create a RAM Drive, this tricks the OS into thinking part of the ram is a hard drive. You can then set your Firefox profile to cache files here removing the performance issues of writing to the SSD.

Full instructions on how to do this are available on:

http://texhex.blogspot.com/2008/09/mozilla-firefox-in-mode.html

Since reinstalling my slipstreamed version of XP and setting up a RAM Drive the whole laptop is a lot quicker to use and Firefox does not experience any long hang ups.