Still Confused :(

I posted a few weeks back about how I could speed up my computer, and I did several of the things suggested to me (thank you, zazonz)! But what about turning off some of the processes off using msconfig? Like right now, 47 are running and I only have one program open. I tried to get rid of the unneeded ones, but when I did it started up in some..weird mode, I can't remember what it was called. It made it seem like I shouldn't un-click the things. Was that just Windows trying to cover all the possible bases, or what? Also, which processes have to remain running? Any help would really be appreciated!

Thank you!

Michael

 

This should help, it's a thread from here baout optimizing your notebook. I hope it's different then what you were told before. http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=5787

 

Thanks, samurai! I did get rid of a lot of the startup crap and a few of the background services. What do you know about the tuneXP program? I've heard mixed things about it, that it can somehow mess some stuff up. Has anyone used it, and if so, had any problems with it? What about turning off system restore? I've created several restore points, but I'm still kind of hesitant to turn it off.. should I be? Would disabling disk indexing make a huge difference in search times, or, for that matter, speed anything else up considerably? One last question: on the C: Properties menu, there's a box that allows you to select "compress drive to save disk space"... is that something I should mess with? My laptop has a pretty small hard drive (30gb), and I'm wondering if that would benefit me at all (I only have 17.3 gb that isn't used up, and I just got it!).

Again, any help or advice you can give me is really appreciated!

Michael

 

One more thing.. why does it show my hard drive as being only 24.1gb? and only 248mb of RAM?

 

There may be a hidden recovery partition using a few GB of you hard drive. You probably have an integrated video card which uses system memory for the video. Unless you do a lot of searching on your hard drive, I would turn off indexing. Turning off system restore will increase performance, but if something gets corrupted, you won't be able to to go back. You'll have to re-install windows. I use a program called Acronis True Image. After I get everything installed like I like, it makes a backup of the hard drive. Then you can use a recovery CD to restore everything in like 10 minutes. There is a little program called RegCleaner. You can use it to turn off unwanted start-up programs without getting the warning dialog box.

 

Oh, thanks again! I was wondering if I'd benefit much from just doing a fresh install of windows. I don't know that I even have the right CD, though.. I used the utility provided by Dell to burn one, but would that just reload all the crap that came preinstalled? If not, would I still have the drivers on here? Could I ask Dell to send me a CD to do a fresh install and the drivers? Why the hell can't they just include an XP CD in the box?? Grr.

 

YES!!!! you would see a big bost in performance by doing a fresh install of windows. The cd's you have from dell would put all that crap back on if you used them. The reason companies like DELL dont put plane cds with just windows on it is because the few people that would exploit it and install it on multiple computers causeing microsoft to raise prices and and cost DELL more because they arnt getting the discounts from the softwear poeple that pay DELL to include their programs.