Unfortunately you can’t boot from these SD readers (if you know how, please let me know), but using a small USB SD reader I got from SanDisk, I can boot the AA1 from any SD or SD-HC card.

The USB card reader I have is the SanDisk MicroMate (SDDR-113). I got when I bought a 4 GB SanDisk Ultra II Class 4 SD-HC card (long name, I know) and the two make a nice couple. The reader seems to work with any SD/SD-HC card I throw at it. I’ve tried the 4GB SanDisk SD-HC, a Kingston 8GB SD-HC and a Maxell 4GB SD card (and a lot of old low capacity cards) and they all work.

Information on preparing the SD card for booting and a guide for shrinking and installing Windows XP on the AA1 is found here: Running Windows XP on Acer Aspire One

And yes, the AA1 now had power-on password protection. I typed in my password, but no… Wrong password! I typed it once more, but with same result: Wrong password! OMG! What went wrong? I did type the same password twice – the same I am now trying to get the bios to accept, but no luck. I finally decided to give num-lock, scroll-lock and caps-lock a try, and to my surprise, my password worked perfectly with caps-lock enabled. I could not remember pressing caps-lock when typing my new password, so I went back to change my password once again – this time without caps-lock. I typed a new password – caps-lock free – saved it and rebooted the AA1. But once again, the AA1 wouldn’t accept my password. Pressing caps-lock solved the problem once again, so I guess it’s a bug in the AA1’s bios messing with caps-lock…

So remember, if’ you’re planning on playing with bios passwords on your AA1 – keep caps-lock in mind!

As you probably know, the AA1 has no CD-ROM drive, so installing Windows XP from CD is not an option. Luckily, Thom Holwerda at OSnews.com found a great piece of software for building a bootable USB-stick used to install Windows XP from. The software is called nLite and is used to make custom Windows XP installs. And as an added bonus, nLite can also be used to build an image file which can easily be copied to your USB-stick. Head over to OSnews.com and take a look at the article “Installing and running Windows XP“.

After I finished installing Windows XP, I needed some “lightweight” software for the AA1. The A110 model only packs an 8 GB SSD hard drive, so installing Office and Photoshop is not an option. Using the AA1 for iTunes is not possible either, as my music collection is way bigger than 8 GB… The AA1 is a mini notebook suited for online services like Google Docs, GMail, Flickr etc. and any application that requires a lot of storage space or a powerful CPU should be installed on a more powerful computer.

But no computer without software. It’s possible to find great free software online, so the only thing you need to pay for is a Windows XP license. I have made a list showing the software I have installed on my AA1 and assuming you already have your Windows XP, you’re done paying for now.

Software I have installed:

• Microsoft Windows XP – http://www.microsoft.com/windows/xp/
• FeedReader – http://www.feedreader.com/
• BitTorrent – http://www.bittorrent.com/
• Windows Live Writer – http://get.live.com/
• Windows Live Messenger – http://get.live.com/
• Windows Live Picture Gallery – http://get.live.com/
• Adobe Reader – http://www.adobereader.com/
• Firefox – http://www.getfirefox.com/
• Daemon Tools – http://www.daemon-tools.cc/
• WinRAR – http://www.rarlabs.com/
• Google Chrome – http://chrome.google.com/
• Google Talk – http://talk.google.com/
• Windows Media Player 11 – http://www.windowsmediaplayer.com/
• AVG Antivirus Free – http://free.avg.com/