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joy12345

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How to Increase the Speed of Laptop: Performance

I have a laptop: P3, 800MHZ, 192 RAM with XP Pro

I would like to increase of my Laptop, what are the tips and tricks to do that?

Regards
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joy12345

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Its compaq presario 1700.
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JohnnyCanuck

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I think you have excellent advice above. Just let me stress the #3 item:
Take a look at www.answersthatwork.com for their process list. Very good.
Also check the autostart items in the registry. Generally, you don't need to have anything but your antivirus and possibly your touchpad drivers in there. I've seen some horrible examples here where people have ten or more autostarting entries in the registry (the "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run" key and "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\...\Run" key). Try to get familiar with those keys as they are favourite dwelling places for spyware startup commands.

/RID
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WinXP performance enhancement
http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/supertweaks.htm
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"To be honnest, Norton Utilities and Systemworks can't keep up and made my system even worse when i tried them. Anything better & top-quality ?"

Forget it. For every hardware step forward in speed and capacity, there's a step forward in software bloat. A Pentium 133 with win3.11 will start up faster than a P IV 2GHz win XP machine. For productivity software there hasn't been a step forward since forever if you're talking speed... The tools for protecting your system have turned into manacles...

For speed you'll have to turn to a clean system, a minimal amount of processes running and, if internet connection is present, an external firewall. There are no shortcuts. You need to know your system.
/RID
tweaking services and start-up is a good idea, blackviper.com also has a guide to determine which services could be disabled (like remote reg, upnp, etc.).

Also, make sure cpu throttling is disabled in bios, this function will reduce your cpu speed and thereby enlong your battery life, but will slow thing down too.

Make sure you have the latest hotfixes, servicepacks and drivers (video, chipset and directX). For the drivers, try tweaked ones; for example DNA drivers are much beter than ATI's catalyst drivers and support more hardware too! (just installed them on an ATI Mobility M6, which is not supported by ATI's drivers...)
Install a video tweaking tool as well. Look for the drivers/tweakers on: www.guru3d.com

If you have NTFS as filesystem; turn off 'update last accessed attribute' and also 'create 8.3 filenames' (use this one only when not using legacy software). (both can be done with the freeware tweaking tool x-setup: http://www.x-setup.net/downloads/home.asp?lang=EN)

Increase IOpagelocklimit to increase drivespeed (x-setup), defrg regularly (system mechanic's defrag is way better than windows' build-in, how-ever not freeware)

Also, upgrading mem would speed things up quite a bit (but is more expensive)

Ever noticed how fast a fresh install of windows is? Here my final tip: install windows fresh, update it, install all software u use standard and make an image of the disk...when windows becomes slow again, just back-up your docs and data, and put the image back...

Blue Rishi
the 1st thing that would definitley work is adding more ram. i dont recommend running xp with any less than 256 of ram.

2nd use your msconfig utility and clean up  your startup

3rd download spybot search and destroy and get rid of any spyware

4th go to system properties to performance and make sure applications is clicked

5th if u have more than one hard drive....spread your paging file across all the drives so that your pretty much setting them up in a raid.
my hard drive is 10 gigs and only 2.6 gigs is free
"if u have more than one hard drive....spread your paging file across all the drives so that your pretty much setting them up in a raid."

Yup, try adding more disks in you laptop and add a scsi raid controller (grin) ;-)

Seriously, 192mb ram is on the low side and 10gb disk too. 2.6gb free is not enough for speed.
A little bit more memory and a 40gb rpm5400 disk will improve things a lot.
You laptop has a nice design so it's worth it to spend eg. 200$ on hardware upgrades.

I can recommend the Hitachi Travelstar 40GB 5400RPM (around 100$ retail).
Idea: the 10Gb disk can be put in an external usb-case for backup purpuses.

Your pressario 1700 laptop has a maximum memory capacity of 512 mb ram. This ram is in 2 banks, currently a 64mb sodimm and a 128mb sodimm. You could swap the 64mb by a new 128 or 256 mb sodimm. (around 50$ per 128mb in normal retail stores)

For windows xp tuning, my advice would be: don't spend too much time tweaking and cleaning, because in the end you will try tool nbr 101 that will totally corrupt your system, and reinstalling things over and over again isn't exactly a time saver either ;-)

>>  1)  i always switch off the indexing service. to be honnest, it doesn't work well, it's supposed to index to eternity and a simple or advanced search is much more reliable.  a pc becomes snappier immediatly after switchin it off.  (IMMEDIAT)  <<

How do you do that?  Just curious...
2 methods:
- administrative tools, services, set indexing service to manual
- properties of each disk: switch off 'allow indexing service to index this disk for some kind of text searching but not finding', select all subdirs, and select 'ignore all' when some files cannot be changed.
"there are no tools, you have to know your system" was not good enough for me.
I read a number of technotes about speed problems, had a look at the available tools and found a pretty good one.

Windows has a ton of parameters in the registry, that allow to tune certain parts of the system.
Only, there's no user interface at all and no docs. There are also a couple of standard windows tools like gpedit and msconfig, that can be launched manually from the run.. menu.

There are plenty of tweaking tools, most of them focussing on 1 facet (look & feel, network speed, registry, memory, etc..) so only to solve very specific problems.  Most of it is free, hardware- or OS-specific, and dangerous.

Some popular more general tools (tackling several topics and explaining the importance) are:
- norton systemworks  (pushing a cache on the trash, yuck!)
- windows powertoys
- system mechanic (iolo technologies)
- advanced system optimizer
- tuneup utlities 2004 (www.tune-up.com)

TuneUp Utilitites has a splendid interface and tunes, cleans, compresses, explains, speeds up.
A very nice tool imho.