New Utility for Aspire One

November 18th, 2008

Yesterday I installed a new control utility for my Aspire One:  a1ctl.  It is similar to AA1FanControl in that it allows you to control the fan on your netbook, but it also provides additional functionality.  For power savings, the software has the ability to  step the CPU back to 800 Mhz or you can disable the LAN, Wifi, and webcam separately.  It also allows you to downscale the screen so that you can run a 1024 x 768 resolution (I’m hoping I can run Rise of Nations now).  I’ll give a more complete review of the software after I have been using it a few days.

Posted by Brian

5 Responses

  1. UMPCPortal - The Mobile Internet and Computing Reference Site says:
    November 22, 2008 at 8:27 pm

    links from TechnoratiAspire One any longer to test it with, but fear not: Brian Jarvis of UMPC Geek says that he will be covering the software after he uses it for a few days (though that few days might be a while longer now if Brian fried his Aspire One). a1ctl website [UMPC Geek]

  2. John Haigh says:
    July 10, 2009 at 1:37 am

    Hi, Brian. Did you get Rise of Nations working on your AOO? We have just bought one of these (A150) and my son loves that game, but up to now I have had no success getting past the “Graphics servers failed to initialize” error. I am going to try this utility, thanks for the pointer, but any other wise words would be appreciated. Thanks. John

  3. Brian says:
    July 17, 2009 at 8:43 am

    I was able to get it running. The aspect ratio isn’t quite right since it’s doing some kind of pixel trickery, but it’s playable for sure.

  4. Mike says:
    September 16, 2009 at 2:26 am

    I’ve been trying to run RoN on my Acer Aspire One but I keep getting the error message:

    “Rise of Nations cannot run with the monitor display mode set to 256 colors. Please change monitor display to 16-bit color or greater.”

    Obviously I’m at a higher display mode and as far as I can tell everything is updated (I haven’t changed the Intel 945 chipset that came with the computer or anything) which is pretty much the only suggestion that Microsoft has to offer (http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=820089). Still nothing and I have no clue what to do next.

    I’ve read that others have gotten it to work, so I’m really curious now because I like the game a lot and would love to have a game to play to unwind after work. Any help would be appreciated, thanks.

  5. John Haigh says:
    September 16, 2009 at 2:43 am

    Mike, you have reminded me that I never reported back on our experence. We can get RoN to run using one of the settings in a1ctl (I can’t remember which one right now but I’ll look at home tonight and post again tomorrow), but the animation of the game is very slow and jerky, and the scrolling is painfully slow to the point where my son doesn’t play it on the Aspire One.

    I’ll put the a1ctl setting that gets it working for us on here tomorrow.

    Best

    John

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