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Optimize Laptop Methods

This article provides tips to speed up a laptop computer by clearing out unnecessary background programs from startup, disabling unneeded Windows services, tweaking visual effects settings, optimizing virtual memory settings, disabling disk indexing, and using Bootvis to optimize the boot process. Implementing these tips can decrease boot time by over 35%.

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Nahs Nahid Hassan
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55 views

Optimize Laptop Methods

This article provides tips to speed up a laptop computer by clearing out unnecessary background programs from startup, disabling unneeded Windows services, tweaking visual effects settings, optimizing virtual memory settings, disabling disk indexing, and using Bootvis to optimize the boot process. Implementing these tips can decrease boot time by over 35%.

Uploaded by

Nahs Nahid Hassan
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as RTF, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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This article serves as a quick and easy guide to get your laptop computer to boot up and run faster

simply by changing some basic Windows settings or installing some helpful applications.

<O > Clear Out Memory Resident Programs That are not Needed Nearly every program you install thinks that it needs to be running in the background so that it will start faster. Stop them from running in the background, they only use up memory and slow the rest of the system down all the time for a very minimal increase in that particular program loading. Go to Start >Run and type msconfig and go to the startup tab.

To find out what these services do and if you need them or not, visit this website: http://snakefoot.fateback.com/tweak/winnt/services.html It will show which services you can disable based on your OS and whether you are on a corporate network or just a home PC. If there is ever a task or service running and you dont understand what it does, then do a search on www.google.com for it and figure out if it really is needed, you will be surprised at how much faster your system will be by just cleaning this stuff up. While you are at Snakefoots site take a look at the tips/tweaks page as well, it has some good registry tips to speed things up. Tweak XP Registry for Speed Using TuneXP A more simple way for anyone to apply most of these registry tweaks that really help increase your speed without running regedit is to download DriverHeavens tuneXP , then enable these tweaks and any others you like.

While you are over at the system properties page, go over to the windows updates page and turn off automatic updates. Its a waste of CPU power for this to be running in the background all the time when Microsoft only posts their updates once a month. Just be sure to keep an eye on the windows update page and download the critical updates as theyre posted. Next go over to the Advanced tab and click on the performance settings button and look over the visual effects panel. You can just set them with the radio buttons for a fast easy change or go custom to suit yourself. These visual effect can slow things down a bit, in fact some of them like the slide or fade options make your PC seem slower by making these functions slowdown for a visual eye-candy kind of thing. The ones I like to keep enabled are. Smooth edges of screen fonts Show windows contents when dragging Show shadows under menus/mouse pointers Use drop shadows for icons on the desktop Then go from the visual effects tab over to the advanced tab and select virtual memory. Then change it from system managed size to custom. Most sites say to set your page size to 2x your installed memory size, you can do this but I dont. I dont think if you have

1GB of memory installed, that you need 2GB of pagefile. With my system I have 1GB of memory and 256-512MB of pagefile. I made the top range 512MB just in case, but even with large photoshop files with many layers, Ive never gone above the 256MB of pagefile. A word of warning, if you have upgraded to Windows Service Pack 2 (SP2) many of these settings were reset to factory defaults, so check them even if youve set them in the past. Disable Disk Indexing Open windows explorer and right-click on icon for each hard drive and select properties, then uncheck allow indexing service to index this disk for fast file searching Sure it speeds up file searches somewhat, but how often do you do these searchs? The trade off is that it slows everything down all the time so that when you do do a search once in awhile it does it a little fasterwhat a ripoff! Turn it off and get the speed increase instead.

When using Bootvis you can do a trace > next boot, and then on the next boot it will make a graphical representation of all the process and drivers that are loaded and how long each one takes. From this you can see how long it took to boot into windows. Then run it again, this time do a trace > optimize system; it will then rearrange the location of boot files on the hard drive and the order in which they are loaded to speed up the entire boot process. Conclusion Your mileage may vary, but on my ThinkPad T42 my boot time went from 45 seconds before the optimizations to 29 seconds afterwards, thats more than a 35% decrease in boot time, well worth the effort! Resource Links Here is a set of resource links used in this article and for further research you might like to do. Check back to NotebookReview.com for updates to this article and other types of resource articles in the future. Annoyances.org

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Tip Jar and Note on the Author Jack O'Neill is an independent writer and technology consultantthat resides in Colorado USA. He hopes you find this article helpful and you learn things that enable you to be happier and more productive with your computer. If you do indeed benefit from informationJack has provided and want to encourage him to write more, then drop a $1.00 in the tip jar via PayPal as a thank you and an encouragement for more!

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