Sometimes I have to use my wife’s five year old laptop when my very fast desktop computer is in for repairs or upgrades. Boy, is it slow in comparison. Most laptop computers are usually slower overall than most desktops, unless you spend thousands of dollars on the highest-performance “desktop replacements.” Portability is great but faster definitely matters. Here are some things you can do speed up your laptop.
1. Replacing a standard 5400 rpm hard drive with a 33 percent faster 7200 rpm drive is probably the best investment you can make in a laptop. Disk operations are the biggest bottleneck in all but the cheapest, underpowered laptops. Replacing a laptop’s hard drive is much easier than the same upgrade on a desktop machine. There’s usually just one screw to remove. Then you pull off the drive bay cover; pull out the hard drive; slip in the new one; format the new drive and install all your software and data. The restoration of programs and data is easier if you made a disk image copy before removing the old drive. Any shop in RIMO that repairs laptops will be able to do this for you. It might even be free if you buy the faster drive from them. There is one other possibility, that is a SSD (Solid State Drive), wow are they fast, but they are also pretty expensive AND currently have a small capacity. Go here: http://www.crucial.com/promo/index.aspx?prog=ssd and put in your laptop brand and model and see what they suggest.
2. Adding more RAM improves laptop speed, up to a point. Add up the memory requirements of your operating system and the applications you use most, and get the next higher increment of RAM. Going beyond 4 GB yields only small performance increases so it’s seldom worth it. However, if you use your laptop to manipulate large data bases, video files, or graphic files, you may want additional RAM so you can set up a RAM drive large enough to hold such files. If you use a RAM drive be sure to save your work to disk frequently, as any shutdown of the computer will lose all data stored in RAM.
3. Defragmenting your hard drive can provide noticeable speed increases, particularly if your laptop’s hard drive running 75 per cent full or more. A file that is all in one piece can be read much faster than one that lies scattered all over the drive in several fragments. Some utilities, such as Advanced System Care Pro, optimize the placement of files and folders on your hard drive so that the most frequently used files are at the outer rim of the disk where it moves faster beneath the read/write head.
4. Keep your hard drive free of unneeded files, so that the operating system has fewer files to index and search when one is needed. Empty your Recycle Bin and delete temporary files often. Uninstall programs and delete old pictures and videos that you haven’t used in a long time. Don’t be a packrat like me.
5. By default, Windows uses the power conservation features built into modern laptops to save battery life at the expense of some performance. You can change these settings in Control Panel > Power Options to use maximum performance all the time, but you should be prepared for shorter battery life. This may not matter if your laptop is plugged into an electrical outlet most of the time.
Want more ideas for speeding up your laptop? Bob Rankin’s humorous “Make Windows XP Run Faster!” (http://askbobrankin.com/make_windows_xp_run_faster.html) contains some tips that apply to both laptops and desktop models. And even if you run Vista or Windows 7, almost all of those tips still apply. Check ‘em out!
This week’s first tip is short and sweet: You can quickly create shortcuts to a file by holding down CTRL+SHIFT while dragging the file to your Desktop!
Have a busted mouse, well here is our second tip: To restore a mouse you are about to throw away; try this:
1. Soak and agitate it in hot soapy water (unplug it first)
2. Rinse in hot water and shake dry
3. Rinse in isopropyl alcohol, return the alcohol to its container
4. Hang to dry overnight
5. If it still doesn’t work, cut off its tail!
Have a question or problem? Write me at BaliPCAdvisor@Gmail.com. I’ll try and answer as soon as I can.
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