My application checklist for Windows XP on my Acer Aspire One

Now that I've got Windows installed on my AA1 I thought I would work out which applications I should install.

Music Applications
Itunes
My favourite Music application. I've been using my IPOD for years and I love it, I have my music stored on a network device so I can use Itunes on my Acer Aspire one without eating into the valuable storage space.

Office Applications
Open Office
Open Office is a good free alternative to Microsoft offie with great functionality - a must for all laptop owners.

Multi-Media Applications
Sling player
VLC Player - VLC player is a great media player which plays just about every video and audio format.

Games
Mame - agreat arcade emulator.
FreeCiv - everybody loves Civ.

Internet Security for the Acer Aspire One

Now that I'm running Windows XP on my Acer Aspire One, I'm aware that I need to protect my AA1 against Viruses and other Internet threats.

I'm also aware that I need to minimize the overhead on the humble processor in the AA1 so I've found a few useful utilities which seem to do the trick.

Internet Browser: Firefox Version 3

Given the recent security alterts around Internet Explorer I made sure that the browser on my Acer Aspire One was FireFox Version 3. Firefox includes strict anti-phishing and anti-malware measures and has an open source process to include new security updates.

More information on the security facilities in Firefox can be found here.

Firewall: Windows Firewall

What's a firewall? (from Wiki)
A firewall is an integrated collection of security measures designed to prevent unauthorized electronic access to a networked computer system. It is also a device or set of devices configured to permit, deny, encrypt, decrypt, or proxy all computer traffic between different security domains based upon a set of rules and other criteria.

Windows Firewall is the standard firewall that comes free with Windows XP.

Anti Virus Software for the Acer Aspire One: Avast!
Avast! is a free (for home users) anti virus software, downloadable from http://www.avast.com/eng/download.html

Avast! is aimed at preventing several types of computer threats, including those that are not technically computer viruses such as spyware and even rogue anti-spyware, and can also make a virus Recovery DataBase which is used to recover files when they are infected (instead of deleting them). The program is available with text and voice translations for 27 languages.

Script Protection for the Acer Aspire One: NoScript

Many websites contain scripts, often these are harmless and need to be run, but sometimes these scripts are malicious and install malware on your computer. NoScript gives the choice back to you of if you want a site to be able to run scripts or not. No script will be able to run unless you give it permission to do so, this might sound like a pain but you can set NoScript to always allow scripts from your favourite page...so you can forget about it after you have set it once for your page.

Windows XP has now been installed on my Acer Aspire One

I'm finally installed Windows XP on my Acer Aspire One.
It wasn't as easy as I had imagined, I originally had hoped to plug in an external drive using the process described in my post here, and boot from my Windows XP disk. Unfortunately the setup process crashed twice so I searched the internet for a different approach.

Fortunately there is another option.
Check out this process here to see how to install Rons TinyXP.
There is a guy out there who has created a optimised installation of Windows XP for the Acer Aspire One, and it looks to work really well. The original download link has now expired BUT a quick google search will help you find it.

So far so good. I'll let you all know how it goes.

A great article on tweaking the Acer Aspire One

Whilst I'm finding time to install Windows XP I thought I would share this.
A post on the Acer Aspire One forum reminded me of a great article I read on the register site on how to tweak your AA1.

The article in full can be found by clicking here and it worth a read for every AA1 owner.

If anybody else knows of any good articles on getting the most out of the Acer Aspire one then please feel fee to post them in the comments section of this post.

Wow - Time flies

Well we are still using Ubuntu - and the plan is still to change to Windows XP.

I've just not had a spare couple of hours to do the installation - hopefully over the next week I'll get it done.