My Aspire One came with a Huawei E180 3G modem preloaded with a connection/sms manager called “Mobile Manager”. When starting Mobile Manager, the software creates a dial-up connection in my “Network Connections” folder. The modem works great on Windows XP, however, whenever I unplug the 3G modem and connect to a LAN/WLAN, the “Dial-up connection” window keeps popping up every 30 seconds or so – and all my network traffic is halted until I click cancel and the window closes.

I found a solution for the problem. Simply find your internet options in your control panel (or run the command inetcpl.cpl), click the “Connections” tab and select “Never dial a connection”. Click OK and you’ll never see the connect window again.

Mobile Manager (my Huawei connection software) still connects to the internet after I changed this option, but other software may run into problems if you play around with these settings.

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/