Travel Technology - How to optimise performance of a Centrino Laptop ?

I have an old Sony TR1A Centrino Laptop and want to use it for mainly web browsing, but to maximise its performance for this. It is now my 3rd PC, but I'd like to continue using it ...

Apart from removing all unnecessary programs, defragmenting, cleaning up the disks etc., what settings should I change to get maximum performance ?

It has 30GB HDD, 512MB DDR SDRAM and runs on MS Windows XP Home Edition .. Running Intel Pentium M @ 900MHz and 820.11b on Intel 855 chipset if this is useful ....

Thanks for your expert direction !

In addition to the things you said, turn off all services you don't need. This guy has a very good guide on which services you can turn off, in various configurations, and other ways to reduce the overhead of the OS:

http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/supertweaks.htm

Under item number 5, click on Services, and there's a ton of great information there for services that can be disabled or set to manual startup rather than automatic startup.

With only 512MB of memory, it's critical that you turn off and get rid of as much as you can. Is the memory already maxed on that system? If not, you might consider adding some. Even if you minimize the OS footprint, you will probably start using the swap file when you load any apps, including the browser.

Here's a very good list of startup programs you can use as a reference if you find other stuff running that isn't listed on BlackViper's web site:

http://www.sysinfo.org/startupinfo.html

Make sure to backup the registry before you make any changes to it. Once you're sure everything works, you can delete the registry backups since you have a small disk. (or back it up to an external drive.)

Another good program is one of the so-called decrapifiers. ccleaner is pretty good. http://www.ccleaner.com/

-David

Right click on "My Computer" and select "Properties." Choose the advanced tab. Click performance button. Then choose "adjust for best performance". That might help a little.

I would start with bumping up the memory. It may mean getting rid of one of the memory modules you currently have, but a 1 gb sim should run about $30 to $40 on e-bay for that.

If you are running it off battery, check the power management settings to make sure it's not slowing down or cutting out the disk drive too fast to save battery power. Yes, you will use the battery faster, but the machine may preform faster too.

There are some tweaks you can do to the network settings, places like dslreports have tweak tests on pages like this

http://www.dslreports.com/tweaks

that may help with the network speed.

I have an old Sony TR1A Centrino Laptop and want to use it for mainly web browsing, but to maximise its performance for this. It is now my 3rd PC, but I'd like to continue using it ...

If that's really all you want to do with it, burn off XP and load Ubuntu Linux.

Failing that, if it's OS install is years old, burn it off, rebuild the OS with a bare OS install and a few hours of windowsupdate.

I have an "old" Dell D600 that I'm using for a web browsing and checking-email box. Ubuntu is almost silly fast compared to doing the same tasks on XP--even with the same programs (Thunderbird for email and firefox for browsing).

If that's really all you want to do with it, burn off XP and load Ubuntu Linux...Exactly what I was going to say. Linux is way lower overhead than Windows. If you don't need to run Windows apps, which for Web browsing you don't, it's a no-brainer on hardware that isn't up to what 2008 (or even 2005) software expects. You don't have to be a super-geek to get that much of it up and running, either, and the days of having to write shell scripts to do anything with a Unix-like system are long gone.

Thanks for all your help guys !

I have done much of the cleanup and registry edits, and things are definitely getting better.

Wil work some more tomorrow....

Thanks re; Linux, but I do have 1 or 2 progs still on the machine that I may need sometime in the future, so no go there for thhe moment...