Insurance Companies

On Tuesday last week Hannah had a minor car accident. She went into the back of another car while changing lanes.

The most damage was probably to her confidence. The car's damage was mostly cosmetic.

So of the car goes to get repaired courtesy of my insurer. For the last few days I have been under the impression that the cost of repair was £2800 and that it would be completed by the 28th.

In the mean time I would get a courtesy car.

Like hell I will!!

I got a phone call from an assessor this morning, he has decided that a car that has cosmetic damage will be written off! Why because the cost of repair has somehow jumped to £3635! More than the car is worth by just £3 apparently.

So no courtesy car then. Train tickets galore.

Oh well at least Hannah gets a nice fat cheque in the post.

Vote Dizzee for PM

Vote Dizzee!!

Acer Aspire One

The subject of my first post is my newly acquired Acer Aspire One. After a few weeks of hunting and comparing models and prices I finally did it.

In terms of hardware/OS I found that the AOA150Ab linux model was best to go for. Why? Let me explain.

Acer have (ignoring the OS options and the colour options) 3 different models. All 3 models are identical, except for 2 things.

Base model (A0A110Ax)
RAM = 512MB (one 512MB DDR2 SoDIMM)
Storage = 8GB SSD

Mid model (AOA150Ax)
RAM = 512MB (one 512MB DDR2 SoDIMM)
Storage = 120GB SATA HDD

Top model (AOA150Ax)
RAM = 1GB (two 512MB DDR2 SoDIMM)
Storage = 120GB SATA HDD

So next I looked at the price difference.

1. Base model £195 - £199 (RRP £219)
2. Mid model £217 - £239 (RRP £229)
3. Top model £249 - £279 (RRP £249)

There is quite a significant price different between the mid and top models. I did a little research on the cost of some compatible RAM. I looked at both 512MB and 1GB options. The cheapest I found was £6 and £10 respectively.

So next to look at the storage capacity, I had to do a little digging here. The base only has an 8GB SSD, not very much. With some research I found that the base model does not have the capacity to be upgraded to have a SATA HDD, although you can get an IDE micro laptop drive, which is supported but rare. I can rule this one out straight away.

The mid and top models do however have 120GB HDD already in them, no need to upgrade at all.

So knowing that the RAM in the top model is 1GB and made of two 512MB sticks and that the mid has 512MB with a spare slot for expansion, and knowing how cheap 1GB of RAM is the choice became obvious.

For only £227 (with 1GB of RAM for a total of 1.5GB), £13 less than the lowest price for the top model I purchased the mid range Acer Aspire One.

Of course throw the Windows versions into the mix and the choice of Linux makes a great deal of sense even if you just install something else instead. Which brings me to the next part of this post.

I did play around with Linpus the OS that is included but did not find it all that intuitive. I followed some simple tips from here

that were very good if you intend to keep the OS. The only snag I had with this is that running the update widget caused the WIFI to be disabled.

Anyway I really wanted to get something better be it Linux or Windows. For simplicity though I chose Windows, Vista to be precise. I put together a cut down version and tested on my PC to make sure it worked with the limited resources. It did.

I may go into how I did all that in another post some time.

The real challenge was to install Vista with no CD/DVD drive, the natural choice.

Most modern PC’s and laptops can boot from USB HDD’s or memory sticks.

I found, courtesy of Ant (one of the guys on my uni course) and this website
I will detail those steps here though to make it a bit clearer. First you need to determine which disk you want to make bootable.


1. Computer Management (Start > Run > compmgmt.msc)
a. click Disk Management
b. Looking at the bottom pane identify your USB drive. It will be one the drives labelled Disk 0, Disk 1, Disk 2 etc

2. Open a command prompt (Start > Run > cmd)

3. At the prompt type the following;

a. C:\>diskpart
b. diskpart>select disk ?
c. diskpart>clean
d. diskpart>create partition primary
e. diskpart>select partition 1
f. diskpart>active
g. diskpart>format fs=fat32
h. diskpart>assign
i. diskpart>exit
j. C:\>xcopy ?:\*.* /s/e/f ?:\

The ? in j. refer to your CD\DVD drive and the letter assigned to you USB after following the above procedure. Once al that is done plug you USB drive into the laptop and turn it on.

By default the Acer will boot from USB first but if your laptop doesn’t then you will need to change this in the BIOS.