I just bought a Aspire one Netbook with Win 7 Starter on it. It only has a gig of ram and will not take any more. I was going to use it just for the robot. But from what I am seeing here I am worried it doesn't have enough to work with. I figure it was a good place to start then put a mini itx in it later when funds allow.

What do you guys think?

Is there things in msconfig or through regedit that I can shut off that will free up some horspower to help it work for now?

@Rural Geek. Don't upgrade from Win 7 Starter to any other editions and 1 Gig may be OK. Win 7 Starter as fully loaded as it can be, will use about 750 Meg of the memory, but you can probably tweak it to run less by disabling services you don't need. If the notebook has an SD slot, you can put in an SD card and Windows can use it for swap space which is faster and less power hungry than swapping to disk too. A 2 Gig card should be big enough for a machine with 1 Gig of memory.

For virus protection, I have found Microsoft Security Essentials, although not the best at finding new viruses, also has the least impact on performance, and it is free, which is nice.

Rich can probably give some additional tuning advice.

Alan

@robotmaker What you have described is very bad practice, if it works for you then great, go nuts with it I'm not going to attempt to convince you otherwise. Depending on how you "copy a drive" makes a massive difference on if it can keep hold of a parasite, your comment that copying a drive means it doesn't get a virus is not strictly true.

I guess it also depends on what you class as a clean drive, that could mean anything from an unformatted drive that has been wiped to government standards or could mean a drive that's had an image of the OS written to it or even a drive that's simply been formatted and the OS reinstalled... In any case that is unimportant. If you are happy with your methods it's your call to continue using them and ignore my advice. I don't expect anyone to follow my advice, they are free to use as much or as little as they wish.

Back to the subject of battery drain, I managed to get off work early so am running BatteryEater on Windows 7 SP1 without any optimisation (other than the SP1 patch). Allowing for recharging time and installation/setup times this could take a fair few days...

Every acer netbook ive seen has a memory slot and are upgradable to either 1.5 or 2 gig ram. Trouble is some y slots are under the keyboard.

ALAN i have a new norton antivirus on my computers and the found no virus on it and a never added a security update on it ,i didnt say he was insulting me this time ,JUST HE DOES NOT NO ME ,so you dont say i get wrong info , laptop are the same i dont use security patches and found no problems with my battery battery issue was with windows 7 until it was fixed

RURAL GEEK ,i like XPLITE program you can remove programs and resources safely and easy and able to place on a flash drive to use as a hard drive but i mostly buy SSD they cost alot more but worth the price and if you robot bumps into anything or falls it wont get damage

JOSH alot of notebooks and laptops has it under the keyboard,some are tricky to remove i like laptops that has a bottom access panel to it i also another laptop i have on my robot is a acer notebook ,i use about 5 different notebooks ,some robots nice to have a screen

also when i put a computer on my robot i first do a check on the software needed what i going to use it for and find the right size computer for it (speed and memory) i dont look for a overkill putting a faster computer cost a lot more and wont make much difference like if not using a web cam so not much resources and memory is used plus a faster computer uses more battery power most of my post answers has toi do with saving battery power ,like using low current sensor or making low current servo motors battery power is very important to me,less charging and longer run times also look at making my designs as light as i can for same reason i see so many robot builder here make robots and then find out the they dont have a enough torque and have to redesgn it .thats a waste of time and money

@RuralGeek, Windows Starter isn't as processor heavy as it is the basic version and doesn't even come with features such as Aero.

The first thing to do is to check your power settings and get that set up right. Allow it to turn off peripherals which you don't use, dim the display, allow it to turn off hard drives when not in use (unless SSD, in which case optimise it (don't do the ram cache)), disable wifi if you don't need it.

Windows Starter has a lot of the power hungry features already disabled, or more to the point, they aren't there to begin with.

As @TheTechGuru said, use ReadyBoost if possible. disable SearchIndex disable visual effects disable UAC uninstall and turn off the junk MS ships with Windows (add/remove programs) if you don't plan to use it. Disable the sidebar and gadgets Disable screensavers, desktop images, sounds etc.

There is a lot you can do, although I am off out shortly so don't have time to go in to masses of detail, I will if you get stuck though, and I'm sure I've missed a lot of other tricks to speed it up and save on power.

And if you are planning to mess with the registry please back it up first

regedit.exe /s filename

RICH I WILL TRY YOUR IDEAS,to see if i get good results but,still will use WINDOWS XP one main reason WINDOWS 7 cost more,and since i bought over 20 windows xp licensed OEM it will be a very long time before i ever need WINDOWS 7 and i have a 64 bit windows 7 on my special server computer with 2 I7 ,looking to add 2 more