How can I speed up my Alienware M9700?

I inherited this laptop from some friends several months ago (God bless their little alien hearts). They pretty much wiped it clean before giving it to me, and I installed Win 7 Pro SP1 and MS Office 2010. Does anyone have suggestions that will help this lovely alien work a little (or a lot) faster? I realize it's old, and was considered fast for its time, but is it possible to bring it a long a little? Without having to spend much, if any, money?

Here are some screen shots that will hopefully show you what I have on the computer right now.




Thank you

 

It has the ML-44 which is the best CPU, it looks like it only has 1GB ram? You can go up to 2GB, the video cards can also be upgraded but in the end it won't help a whole lot. The single core cpu is a killer unfortunately.

It looks amazing though, that is for sure

 

Yeah It's too bad they didn't grab a Core 2 Duo laptop at the time (M5790 / M9750) or you could probably still game on it with medium settings. That CPU is what kills it.

Without spending money no I doubt there is much you can do given you just re-installed the OS. If you want to spend money you could throw in ram, an SSD, and a better graphics card but that point you are WELL into the $$$ range and may as well just get another laptop. You would also still be stuck with that slow CPU.

I say either enjoy it for light use, do something cool like turn it into a media center / emulator box for the TV or a server, or sell it on ebay.

 

How would I do that, turn it into something cool?

 

Darn, I was sure hoping to somehow speed it up without too much cost. Oh well! I'm curious, what looks amazing?

 

The M9700 of course haha, I love the look of the classic Alienware laptops, the green M9700 is my favorite by far.

It is too bad it is not a M9750, just having a dual core CPU would help out quite a bit. If you do not plan on using it a whole lot or if it is just too old/slow for you I would sell it, you can still get decent money for a fully working unit on ebay. You can sell this, add a couple hundred and get a nice Alienware or other decent gaming laptop that will far exceed anything this unit could possibly do.

 

If you are just going to use it as a basic laptop and are wanting to speed it up you are just going to have to tweak it some.

First I would upgrade the ram, then if you have the money get a SSD. If you don't need a lot of space just look for a used one on ebay. But get a good brand like the Intel X25 g2 SSD's. I have had very good luck with them used.

What else you can do is tweak the OS. Look at task manager to see how many processes you have running right now. We will need to cut this back. Also take a screen shot of what programs you have installed. We may can recomend a lighter weight program that will do the same thing.

Under sound in control panel turn off windows start up sound. That will make windows not play a file at start up making it start up faster.

Download Ccleaner and install. You can edit your start up menu.

If you are getting a flash across the screen every now and then playing a game or just browsing the web go to task manager, services, and the services button on the bottom right corner. Look for desktop windows manager in the list. Right click on it. Stop process and disable start up. You loose aero but it stops the flashing.

Go to control panel, programs and features, then on the left hand side look for turn windows features on and off. You can activate your built in games from there like cards, etc. I personally don't use IE so I turn it off, I also turn off Remote Differential Compression, Tablet PC Componets (no touch so you don't need it), Windows gadget Platform, and both XPS services.

Download the UWT, ultimate windows tweaker. There are several things you can tweak with this program.

Another option is a custom rom taking out what you don't want.

These are just some of my tweaks I do, there is more that can be done.

 

This may seem like taking a step back to some, but if I'm not mistaken your rig originally came with Win XP, and Win 7 is two generations beyond what your laptop was built for. Even if it was certified "Vista-ready" when it came off the assembly line, it is optimized for XP. It's well-known that with every new iteration of Windows, Microsoft takes advantage of the hardware advances/capabilities that have taken place since the previous version of Windows and rather than streamline the next version, they presume the higher CPU speeds/RAM capacities will more than mask the new and larger OS load. This is all fine and dandy if you've got the latest/greatest hardware. If not, you're looking at longer load times and slower all-around performance from your once-upon-a-time hot rig. Your laptop, even when maxed out at 2GB RAM, is running an OS that needs a minimum 4GB of RAM to just function normally (not necessarily decently), with a sweet spot at 8GB.

So... unless you've got progs that you absolutely need Win7 for, I suggest downgrading to XP. As painful as that may sound, in the end you'll have that hot rod running the way it was meant to be - without all the excess baggage of a newer/bloated OS. Lets face it, there was never a whole hell of a lot to be gained by making the jump to Vista/Win7 unless you're buying new hardware to take advantage of greater RAM capacities with a 64-bit OS version.

That's the glaring bottleneck in your system assuming you've maxed your RAM capability.

The next optimization is to adjust your pagefile (swapfiles) system. This is your virtual memory file. If you've got 2GB of RAM the best config for your pagefile is RAMx1.5 or 3GB. Set both beginning and ending sizes to 3GB. This will keep your system from constantly re-adjusting the pagefile (and therefore taxing the performance). This is where your system loads your programs and store files it needs to use.

Regularly clean out your Windows/Temp folder and your user/local settings/temp folder. Sometimes apps get hung up and stuck and this is where those settings get stored. Clearing these out helps by letting them reset them to their normal/original parameters.

Turn off any/all automatic update settings for your apps. Especially Windows automatic updates. Nothing worse than having programs start calling home and engaging in updates while you're in the middle of fragging your enemies.

Clear your browser caches

Defrag your hard drive

Uninstall any unneccessary programs (including apps like enhanced toolbars, search apps, especially programs that are always running in the background, pre-loading programs). Sometimes the biggest offenders are anti-virus programs. Use one that doesn't put such a heavy load on your system. I have a setup where I don't even need to use anti-virus software anymore. (Ask me about it if you're interested)

As a corporate tech, I guarantee you these will give you the biggest performance boosts and keep your system running like new.