Unbloating a 1318

Picked up a refurbished 1318 from Dell outlet and i was very happy with it at first, vista seemed to run fine with 3G ram, but as of late it seems to be running slower. I haven't really done anything with the os bloat mostly because i am new to vista. However now that the bloat seems to be noticable, what can i do to trim it down?

I don't have a real copy of vista to do a fresh install, I do however have the restore disk that came with the laptop. Can I do a fresh install with that? Or would I be better off going through and removing preinstalled applications form the control panel? At this time i have 51 services running, while on my XP desptop I only have 26. Whats a good number of services to shoot for when running vista?

 

Depending on how the original buyer configured you lappy, they may not have declined all of the junk software Dell offers.

Your recovery DVD can be used to do a clean install since it's just a regular Vista DVD. You'll use your resource CD to install drivers afterward-it walks you through installing the ones needed for your configuration.

All additional software (MS Works/Office, McAfee/Norton/Trend Micro, MyDVD, etc.) are on separate discs that you should have gotten with your system, so you can only install what you want

In addition, people have used this guide ( http://www.blackviper.com/WinVista/servicecfg.htm ) to lessen the number of services they have running. I haven't used this guide or stopped any services at all and have no lag whatsoever. Just be careful when disabling services! (Create a System restore point first)

The number you'll end up with just depends on your configuration, there's no real hard and fast rule.

BTW, how long have you had your Inspiron. It takes Vista some time to learn how you use the machine, index your files for search, etc. If you jut got the machine, I would give it time, although with 3 GB of RAM, Vista should be flying as it runs pretty well with 2 GB.

 

Cool, i'll check out that guide and see if i can trim down the services a bit. I'd rather not have to do a clean install since i've already added a good deal of software and reinstalling everything would be an all day ordeal.

Thanks for the quick reply

 

When I got my inspiron it had something like 70 processes running and booted with about 1.2Gb of RAM used (2GB total). You sound like you don't actually have that many processes running given the Vista standard, but you should be able to get RAM usage down to around 800Mb.

A clean reinstall is usually the best route, however I would be taking a look at the start menu group and program list to see what a typical boot is loading first.

 

Use the guide to do a fresh install using your restore DVD. If you didn't get a drivers CD with your order make sure you are able to download those drivers before you reinstall.