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    Sprucing Up Old Laptop - Dell Inspiron 300m

    Discussion in 'Dell' started by Rex32, Oct 29, 2008.

  1. Rex32

    Rex32 Newbie

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    Hey Everyone,
    My buddy gave me his old Dell Inspiron 300m a few weeks ago. I didn't think I'd use it much as I have a 700m and a desktop but I find myself using it more and more since its soo small.
    Since I've been using it more though, I've encountered some speed issues.
    It has the base RAM, 128 non-removable and a 256 stick. I think I'll order a 1gb stick of PC-2100 for it, anyone have some they need to sell?
    Anyone know of anything else I can do it? It's so old that parts have to be cheap. Is a processor upgrade possible? I know that is normally not done at all, especially to laptops but I figured what the heck... I got it for free after all.
    Does anyone know of good guides to slim down XP to make it run better on an older, slower pc? I have Dell OEM XP Pro, SP3 installed.

    Thanks a lot guys and any help would be greatly appreciated.
    Mike
     
    Rex32, Oct 29, 2008
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  2. booboo12

    booboo12 Notebook Prophet

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    Add more RAM, that's an easy way to make XP shine on an older machine, without sacrificing the ability to load it up however you want.

    Although I have an HP from the late 90's upgraded to XP w/ 256 MB of RAM (the max supported by that PC) that runs pretty good, it's because I'm very judicious about how many processes run in the background, so it only has the bare minimum of programs installed on it. (Antivirus, OpenOffice.org, Mozilla Firefox)

    Another way is to perform a clean install of XP if you haven't already, that allows you to start fresh.

    People also create custom XP installs using a program called nLite that allows them to remove Windows features that they won't use, although (admittedly) i've never used nLite, even when I installed XP home on the HP.
     
    booboo12, Oct 29, 2008
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