What can I take off acer 2920?

Hi all. What can I take off to speed it up a bit? Its runing vista at the moment

 

1. If you're using either Norton or MacAffee anti-virus, use a lighter-weight free antivirus program.
2. If you're not entirely in love with Vista (and who is, really?) either downgrade to Windows XP SP3 or upgrade to Windows 7. Either one will run faster than Vista. Or switch to Linux
3. If you've only got 1 GB of RAM installed, upgrade to at least 2 GB.

Good luck....

 

1 I wouldnt touch them at all
2 I might downgrade at some point but need to back up all my pics and music
3 got 2 gig intalled, would like 4


What of the acer stuff pre installed can I take off. All I need to keep is the webcam

 

I use a 2920, it's a great little machine, and all the mentions in this forum have been very positive. So I'm watching this thread with interest.

I haven't yet taken off any of the Acer stuff, so I can't answer for that, but I keep thinking that I must investigate this. On a small screen, the starter "empowering" front end is very intrusive, and I don't think I've ever used it. However, I do think most of the real problems are from Vista itself.

I have found XP drivers on a rather obscure site, but I've not yet had the guts to try upgrading back to that. There are no W7 drivers as far as I can tell, and my experiences with an early beta of that on a desktop machine were pretty poor. I have Ubuntu on a Toshiba netbook, and it's far superior to Vista, but only for the fairly standard things like writing and arithmetic.

I'm not sure whether most of the Acer stuff loads the machine when not in active use. On other machines I've run some of the SysInternals suite and identified what actually was being used and taking up processing power without achieving anything. I suppose I should try this on the 2920.

 

Win 7 can use practically all Vista drivers available, so retain those if you choose to upgrade to 7. Generally, all of the crappy games by Oberon can be removed, as well as the MS-Office 60-day trial, and Google Desktop (unless you want that, too.)

 

I've taken off almost anything with Acer on it. Not sure if its speeded up yet

 

That was really partly my point. Unless the software is doing something, there will only be a small improvement when it is removed.
It's Vista that spends its time doing things or making itself look pretty that slows machines down. I'm not sure yet whether Windows 7 will be all that big an improvement.
A machine with a newly installed OS will usually look faster than the same machine with a tired old OS with lots of left-overs from applications tried but long forgotten. So Win 7 looks good still.

If I remember when I next am near my 2920, I'll run some diagnostics to see what is actually running.