How to squeeze more speed

Hello all:

I have had a Fujitsu S6210 for about a month and have been quite happy with it. I am, however, a performance addict and would like to make sure that I am doing all that I can to get the most speed out of my laptop. I do not game on this system, I only do web surfing, office apps, visio diagrams, light desktop publishing, and some financial/system analysis software for work.

My usual new system ritual is:

--remove as much unused pre-loaded software as I can
--install TweakUI and get rid of the animations or delays
--run a couple Adaware sessions to make sure that there is no spyware lurking about
--install Mike Lin's Startup Monitor and Startup Control Panel to make sure nothing that I don't want to put itself in my startup can't do it without my permission. I can then also easily disable apps that already start up at login.
--install the Acrobat Speed Up from here http://www.tnk-bootblock.co.uk/prods/misc/index.php
--install Proximitron for pop-up blocking
--find somebody's hosts file for further ad blocking and replace mine with it

What am I missing? Is it worth partitioning my hard drive like I do with my desktop? There are some theories about moving frequently used applications to the outside of the hard drive platter for performance reasons--how would I do this? Will anything beyond 512Mb RAM make a difference? What about a different GUI like litestep or something similar? What background XP services are safe to disable? I am open to any suggestions.

Note that I do understand that the standard drive that comes in this is only a 4200rpm drive. I am trying to avoid adding hardware and do everything that I can via windows, system layout, or utilities.

Thanks everybody!

--K

 

You can also turn of indexing services on each hard disk. It has little to no effect on searching time and helps free up space and gives a bit more speed. I find a defrag always helps alot, along with cleaning out of the windows/prefetch folder. I'm a big fan of partitioning HDD, but mainly for data safety, not sure how/if it helps improve performance.
a


ASUS M6Ne 15.4" WSXGA 1.7 PM ATI9700 80Gb HDD 512Mb RAM

 

Hi kulte,
Thanks for the acrobat tip, works great.
You sound just like me and it's nice to find a fellow proxomitron user. Like underpantman said, disable indexing. Also disable system restore, any office bar stuff or fastfind. Get diskeeper pro 8 and defrag both the drive itself and the boot area, this will speed things up. Get tunexp
http://www.driverheaven.net/dforce/showdoc.php?doc=txp_download
it will help speed things up as well. Search for and d/l microsoft's bootvis program to speed up boot time.
Snakefoot has great info on background services and what can be disabled, here's the link.
http://snakefoot.fateback.com/tweak/winnt/services.html

If you use XP pro there are a lot of services you don't need unless your a server or on a corporate network, also if you login with administrator rights there are also extra services loaded you probably don't need running either.
To give you an idea of what is or is not needed, here is a copy of the services I have running or disabled, some of the ones you probably don't recognize are specific to IBM thinkpads.

Adobe LM Service Manual
Alerter Disabled
Application Layer Gateway Started Manual
Application Management Disabled
Ati HotKey Poller Disabled
Automatic Updates Disabled
Background Intelligent Transfer Manual
Bluetooth Support Service Disabled
ClipBook Disabled
COM+ Event System Started Manual
COM+ System Application Manual
Computer Browser Disabled
Cryptographic Services Started Automatic
DCOM Server Process Launcher Started Automatic(only in SP2
DHCP Client Started Automatic
Diskeeper Manual
Distributed Link Track Client Disabled
Distributed Transaction Coordinator Manual
DNS Client Started Automatic
Error Reporting Service Disabled
Event Log Started Automatic
Fast User Switching Disabled
GhostStartService Manual
Help and Support Manual
HTTP SSL Manual
Human Interface Device Access Manual
IBM KCU Service Started Automatic
IBM PM Service Started Automatic
IMAPI CD-Burning COM Service Manual
Indexing Service Disabled
Infrared Monitor Disabled
IPSEC Services Manual
Logical Disk Manager Manual
Logical Disk Manager Administrative Manual
Messenger Disabled
MS Software Shadow Copy Provider Manual
Net Logon Manual
NetMeeting Remote Desktop Sharing Disabled
Network Connections Started Manual
Network DDE Disabled
Network DDE DSDM Disabled
Network Location Aware (NLA) Started Manual
Network Provisioning Service Manual
NT LM Security Support Provider Manual
Office Source Engine Manual
Panda anti-virus service Manual
Panda Firewall Service Started Automatic
Performance Logs and Alerts Manual
Plug and Play Started Automatic
Portable Media Serial Number Service Manual
Print Spooler Manual
Protected Storage Started Automatic
QCONSVC Started Automatic
QoS RSVP Manual
RegSrvc Started Automatic
Remote Access Auto Connect Manager Manual
Remote Access Connection Manager Started Manual
Remote Desktop Help Session Manager Disabled
Remote Procedure Call (RPC) Started Automatic
Remote Procedure Call (RPC) Locator Manual
Remote Registry Disabled
Removable Storage Manual
Routing and Remote Access Disabled
Secondary Logon Disabled
Security Accounts Manager Manual
Security Center Disabled
Server Disabled
Shell Hardware Detection Started Automatic
Smart Card Manual
Spectrum24 Event Monitor Started Automatic
SSDP Discovery Service Disabled
System Event Notification Started Automatic
System Restore Service Disabled
Task Scheduler Started Automatic
TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper Started Automatic
Telephony Started Manual
Telnet Disabled
Terminal Services Started Manual
Themes Started Automatic
Uninterruptible Power Supply Manual
Universal Plug and Play Device Host Manual
Volume Shadow Copy Manual
WebClient Disabled
Windows Audio Started Automatic
Firewall/Internet Connection Sharing Started Automatic (disable in SP1)
Windows Image Acquisition (WIA) Manual
Windows Installer Manual
Windows Management Instru... Started Automatic
Windows Management Instru...Driver Ext Manual
Windows Time Started Automatic
Wireless Zero Configuration Disabled
WMI Performance Adapter Manual
Workstation Disabled

Jack


"They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security" (Ben Franklin)
http://pbase.com/joneill

 

If you have plenty of ram you might want to try installing a RamDisk driver. It'll let you use a portion of your ram as a different drive so you can run frequently used programs off of your Ram rather then the much slower HD. A ramdisk will probably work best if you put something like the internet explorer's cache there.