Acer Aspire 5672WLMi

For those of you who have purchased this computer, what would be a good list of things to do?

So far I have:

1.) Upgrade to XP Pro.
2.) Merge the partitions somehow.
3.) Convert to NTFS.
4.) Try not to drool all over it.

The box should be showing up here when I'm at work today... so when I get home I get to start tinkering. Are there any other things I should be doing along with that list? I heard that I should do something with the x1600 drivers... update them or use Omega drivers, etc... I dunno. Any suggestions would be very cool and helpful.

Thanks!

 

Lol, I am satisfied with XP Home anyways, so the first one won't be on my list. Try to get Partition Magic from somewhere and do all that you have to do using that.

Read this for more information on updating video card drivers and the like.

I always suggest using this notebook on a flat surface as it gets hot pretty quick if there is no proper ventilation.

 

Well, the only reason I was told to upgrade to XP Pro was that Home edition doesn't take full advantage of the Dual Core processor. Anyway, it's not a big deal for me to upgrade because I got a cheap copy for $5 from the University I'm attending.

Oh, and thanks! ATI Catalyst drivers it is!

 

$5? Whoa!

I don't know about XP Pro making better use of dual core than XP Home. XP isn't multithreaded to begin with....

 

there is no difference in dual core capability between XP Home and XP Pro. There are many people that try to claim otherwise, but they are wrong. If you don't notice any features missing in Home that you've actually seen/used in Pro or are explictly stated as being a benefit of Pro by Microsoft, you don't need it and it won't benefit you.

As for Windows XP being mutlithreaded, you really should disabuse yourself of that false notion... there are currently 993 threads running on my system (with lots of programs running) across a total of 73 processes. explorer.exe has 35 (with a few things open and plenty of system tray icons). the system itself has 126. three svchost processes have 59, 43, and 38 threads for a total of 140 threads between them...

on a "virgin" system running nothing but RDP, IIS FTP, and SQL Server, the system has 54 threads, and one svchost.exe process is using 45 threads. SQL Server is using 36 threads, and another svchost is using 26. A single iexlpore is using 22 threads. Explorer is using 11 threads and there are no system tray icons.

 

The one thing I would suggest is turning off a few services you might not need, and disabling as many apps from starting up and chewing up your pagefile by editing the startup list in msconfig (start ---> run ----> msconfig ----> startup tab).

Just make sure you don't disable your anti-virus or any critical apps you want to startup!

--ssx--

 

SSX,

What services would you suggest disabling ?

 

Check out this thread to see how to go about optimizing your notebook for max performance. Be warned, it might take a while but if you have the patience and go through with it, IMO it's worth it.