Tutorial: Acer Aspire One + Windows 7 Beta

I have installed Ubuntu 8.10 on my Acer Aspire one since the day I bought it last year. It works great but I’m getting bored of using it. Yesterday, I reinstalled the small machine with Windows 7 Beta. Windows 7 really has a big improvement on battery usage and performance. Startup time is very fast and everything works fine except my wireless adaptor doesn’t work very well and missing the touchpad driver.

[smartads]

Luckily, I fixed the problem by download the latest Synaptics Driver and Atheros Driver. Also, I installed Windows 7 Beta by using a 8GB USB drive. I made the USB drive bootable by using the following steps:

1. Run diskpart on a Windows Vista machine as Administrator
2. Type list disk to find out what is the disk number of my USB drive. In my case, it’s disk 5
3. Type select disk 5
4. Type clean
5. Type create partition primary
6. Type select partition 1
7. Type active
8. Type format fs=fat32 quick
9. Type quit to exit
10. If you have Daemon Tools Lite installed, you can use it to mount the Windows 7 Beta ISO image and copy all the files into the USB drive. I don’t have Daemon Tools installed on my parents Windows Vista, so I use my Mac to mount the ISO image.