Welcome to my Fan Blog!

My name is Kelly Williams and this blog is dedicated to the Acer D257 Netbook, what I believe is a wonderful little machine… I plan on posting my upgrades, guides and how-to’s here as a testament to what could be done with what most people may consider a sub-par computer. I use this machine as my “daily driver” and I bought it at Walmart for $228. I’ve allocated a little over $200 for upgrades and such as this will take the cost of the machine to $500, what most folks would consider a mid-grade machine.

Windows Ready Boost

I’ve added a 4GB Sandisk Blade as a DEDICATED Ready Boost drive and just as the Wiki descibed it improved performance a great deal… I think I’ve found that work-around to the 2GB RAM limit I was looking for :)

Battery Woes

My battery time is horrendous… I get MAYBE 2 hours. It’s Lithium Ion so there’s no memory effect… maybe I just got a bad one from the manufacturer. It’s a 3 cell and the 6 cell is only $35. It’s supposed to give me up to 8 hours of time. To be honest I’d call it even with 4-5 hours away from a wall socket… 8 hours seems like fantasy land :D

The Essentials

Loaded up with all the programs that I use EXCEPT Photoshop. I cannot imagine trying to be too creative in 1078×600 :(

Still @ 1GB of RAM, for now…

This is with Aero on (obviously) and with Chrome and uTorrent running. There is only one tab open in Chrome… I believe, although I have only seen up 800MB of RAM used that the DDR3-1333 upgrade will give me a small performance boost. I’m also pretty keen on keeping several tabs going at once with Chrome.

Back to Windows 7, right before my memory upgrade :)

A decision about my Memory

Despite my desire to have 4GB of RM and a 64-bit WINDOWS OS it looks as if I will be playing it safe with 2GB of RAM and a 32-bit OS. If only FFMPEG could do what Freemake Video Converter does I would be more than happy to stay with my Debian-based Crunchbang Linux… I probably would not even upgrade the RAM……………….. hmmmm, yes I would!

Acer’s website info for my CPU/Chipset

Doesn’t it seem like this would support 4GB of RAM, even if only from one DIMM???

Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 ISO Images

Go to Digital River for your REAL ISO Images