My Acer Aspire One Netbook is slow, what can I do to upgrade it to make it faster?

by Tom Valdez  July 22, 2015

Owner / Mountain Peak Computers

tom@mountainpeakcomputers.com

www.mountainpeakcomputers.com

A good friend that has offices in Aurora Colorado asked me what I could do to his Acer Aspire One to make it faster.  He told me that someone else had installed Windows 7 on it the other day and when he got it back it was really slow.

I told him that a SSD drive would definitely help the performance and that I would see if I could upgrade the memory.  I told him that I would do the work for the cost of parts and the labor would be free.  My friend thanked me and gave me his netbook.

Back in the shop I Googled the Aspire One model and found that it had 512MB of memory built on the motherboard and had one PC2 memory slot with a512MB of PC2 memory installed.  I found that the Aspire One model could only take a total of 1.5GB of memory. 

So I first created a image of the current install of Windows 7 on the netbook to a external hard drive.  Then connected a external DVD drive to the netbook and created a recovery boot disk.  I then disassembled the netbook and replaced the old 100GB hard drive with a new 120GB SSD hard drive that we had on hand.  I replaced the 512MB memory stick with a 1GB PC2 memory.

After reassembling the netbook, I then booted from the external DVD and recovered the image to the new SSD drive.  The netbook rebooted when the reimaging was completed.  The netbook booted up and I verified that the memory was recognized.  I verified that all the device drivers were installed.

The next day I returned the netbook to my friend and he powered the netbook up and he was impressed at how fast it was after having replaced the memory and hard drive with a SSD.

If you have a similar problem or any other computer problem you can give Mountain Peak Computers a call at 303-400-4000 for the personal service you demand and we can provide.