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    New laptop

    Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by ConfusedCollegeGuy, Jun 30, 2005.

  1. ConfusedCollegeGuy

    ConfusedCollegeGuy Notebook Guru

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    I just got a new laptop for college, a Dell Inspiron 2200 with a 1.4ghz celeron processor, 256 mb ram, 30gb hard drive...really basic (read: cheap) system. It came loaded with tons of crap that I'll never use...and it slows everything(especially boot/shut down time). I was told i could reinstall XP Pro with the CD thing but then someone told me that it messes with the drivers or something. Also, it's reallllllllly slow. I upgraded from a 5-year-old Compaq desktop with 800 mhz processor and 128mb ram, and I was able to do more multitasking with that than with my new laptop. What would be the best way to make my computer run better/faster and get rid of a lot of that extra Dell promotional stuff? Also, should I upgrade to 512 mb ram? I saw that on dell.com I could get another 256 mb dimm for $47.

    Oh, and another thing... when I type in a chat room (this has only happened in AOL chats so far), sometimes, especially if what I'm typing has gotten lengthy, it'll flip upside down/backwards and looks really weird.... I dunno if that's something wrong with AOL (I'm thinking probably so) or if it's a virus...but I ran a full Norton scan and it came up clean. Anyone have any ideas what the problem is with that or what I can do to fix it?

    I'd really appreciate any help and advice you could offer me :D

    Michael
     
    ConfusedCollegeGuy, Jun 30, 2005
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  2. ZaZ

    ZaZ Super Model Super Moderator

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    Some things you can do to boost your performance are more memory and a faster hard drive. I'm guessing your desktop has a faster hard drive that is why the performance is better. The Celeron M is not a bad CPU, it just won't have the battery life of a Pentium M. You can uninstall all the unneeded stuff that Dell puts on there, just don't remove any drivers, Then run RegScrubXP to clean the registry. Defraging the hard drive will help performance. Also go into msconfig and turn off all the unecessary programs that turn on when you boot. Turning off file indexing and System Restore will boost performance, but if something goes wrong you won't be able to use system restore. You may also have some spyware mucking up your system. Download Sypybot and Ad-Aware and run those. Good Luck.
     
    ZaZ, Jun 30, 2005
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