Aspire 5685 (new) ... uninstalling acer empowerment programs and cr*pware?

Hi folks ... be gentle its my 1st post!

Just purchased my 1st ever laptop an acer aspire 5685 WLMi for 700quid (a bargain IMO). It has 7200processor, 2GB Ram, 15.4" WS, 160GB HDD and loads of other bits and pieces (webcam and battery life are lousy though!!).

My problem is this ... I have now checked out the hardware via various tests and all seems ok so now its time to sort the software out. So far all I have done is uninstall Norton AV and install AVG, Kerio and install all the XP updates. Now I intend to uninstall AOL stuff along with Quicktime (I never use this on my desktops). I am now looking at what I can remove with regard to the other cr*pware on this acer laptop. Can remove this acer empowerment utilities stuff??? or is that unwise? is it just a GUI to features/settings in XP anyway?

Does removing this cr*pware save me any battery life??? I intend to optimise this laptop according to the dummies guide in another thread on this site... will this additional step save further battery life also?

I intend once all this "software optimisation" is complete is to then hopefully undervolt the 7200 cpu with RMClock which should also save an additional 20% on battery life if done right according to another website I googled. Just that 2 1/2 hrs is a bit lousy and I am trying to improve the lifetime at minimal performance cost!

I am also thinking of 2 more steps (1) Once I have got rid of the acer cr*pware hopefully there will be more system memory available such that I can turn off the virtual memory page file (accessing hdd uses power) and maybe use a memory optimisation utility like cacheman/cachemem? (2) Also thinking of doing something about the gfx card undervolting etc or maybe just simply updating the forceware drivers (do the new ones save any power?)

Enough said ... tips appreciated .... When finished I may post up a "to do list" for optimising an Acer 5680!

Jules

 

You're from Chester?? North West Chester? Near Ellesmere Port, Wrexham etc?

 

Don't disable the pagefile. Most programs need a pagefile present for compatibility as well as the fact that regardless of how much RAM you have, few programs will load all necessary components into the RAM, most will cache off the hard drive.

That being said, the entire Empowering software suite can be removed. However, I keep some because of the novel features they add and because I'm too lazy to find other programs that offer the same funcionality. I would remove ePower Management as that might conflict with RMClock. That and I find it too bloated. Windows does the same thing. Also, some laptop features might not be accessible without using Acer software.

 

Sounds like a lousy feature of the XP OS. I logically thought that the windows XP OS pagefile could be turned off for say a 2GB machine. Just that I read that a 256-512MB pagefile was adequate for a 1GB machine (I know that people rec. a 2x system mem for pagefile) so I concluded that a 2GB RAM and no swapfile would cover it!!

The only other thing with regard to virtual memory I can think of is possibly fixing the swapfile size and defraging the drive so that the swapfile allways occupies a continuous fixed area of the drive thus minimising drive access so saving some power and increasing performance. This can be done by setting min and max pagefile size to the same value and defraging. However I suspect that the power saving will be very very marginal probably seconds on a 2 1/2hr cycle!!!! Anyway it is an possible optimisation better than nothing I suppose.


Jules

 

I'm not saying you CAN'T turn it off, it's just that turning it off might cause you to run into compatibility problems with programs. But with 2GB of RAM, Windows will very rarely have to access the pagefile. Setting the pagefile to one size is a good idea.

 

You should make sure you keep launch manager as it controls any buttons on the laptop such as the wireless/bluetooth buttons.

You can get rid of eSettings, ePresentation etc etc.

I would keep:

1. ePerformance management though as it can clear things stored in RAM that a program did not remove when it should have.

2. eRecovery Management just incase you wanted to restore it to factory settings that way.

3. eSecurity manager if you ever plan to encrypt a file, if you do not plan to do this you can remove it.

if anybody disagrees with this please say as you may change my mind about what is worth keeping! lol.

 

Don't worry too much about turning off the pagefile. I've done it for the past year and haven't had any compatibility issues so far. The only thing I've noticed is launching older versions of Adobe Photoshop would warn you about having no pagefile, but dismissing the warning would let you use photoshop without any issues.

I think the performance increase gained (and HD thrashing reduction) is well worth that minor annoyance with photoshop.