Improving Performance With Drivers - Make your Laptop Faster

For those who don't know many of the drivers for your laptop can be found on the device manufacturer's website.

For example if you have a:

-3945 Intel Wireless ABG Card you can download the latest drivers from Intel.com.

Usually these drivers are the most up-todate and stable versions. My Asus W2's wireless didn't work well on vista and after updating with the driver from intel it worked great.

Ok so using the manufacturer direct drivers helps but what else can we do to improve performance in general?

Let's take ATI graphics catalyst software for example. You download the latest install, it extracts it's setup directories to a folder on your pc and runs the Catalyst setup. You follow the steps on the install and all of the sudden you end up with ATI tray icon, ATI options when you right click on the desktop and more. What really happened? 2 things...

1- The ATI Graphics Card Driver was installed. This is all you really need. This tells windows how to use your card and what it is capable of doing.

2- It installs this suite of software to manage your ATI card (3D options, displays and more). This suite of software is set to run when you start windows and is now taking up resources. Most of the options provided by the ATI Catalyst software can be changed/set by using the Windows Display Properties. If you like having more control of your 3D preferences then I would suggest using a tool like ATI Tray tool which actually lets you make changes and save them for later use. It also has a smaller footprint then catalyst.

By installing JUST the driver versus installing the Graphics card management software, sound management software, wireless manager, and more you are reducing the number of running processes and resource takers in your system, which in turn results into a leaner meaner windows.

There ARE cases unfortunately when you have to use the software management suite. For example you can't get the s-video out port to work.

I do use Intel Wireless manager software because it is better than Windows XP built in management (Wireless Zero Config). It allows me to tell it to only connect to my router and ignore other routers. If windows xp finds a better connection than your router, it may discnonnect you. Intel's software allows you to control your connections more. Vista however has included an option to force your wireless card to stay connected to only the router you specifiy. So if I was running Vista I would not install the extra software to manage my wireless network.

There is a good tutorial on the forums on how to perform a fresh install of windows. Once you have a fresh install and need to install drivers all you have to do is get them from the manufacturer site -> extract them to a folder -> open "Device Manager" by clicking the Start button -> right clicking "My Computer" -> "Manage" -> "Device Manager" (on the left part of the window) -> then right click on the device you are updating the driver for -> "update driver" -> browse to the location you extracted the files to and install the driver. In some cases you may have to choose "Have Disk" and browse to an *inf file located in the extracted folder.

You do not have to run the "Setup.exe" or full blown install included with your download.

A Celeron laptop with a fresh install of XP and only driver installs runs way faster than one with all the extra software included for the sound, graphics, touchpad, wireless, etc. Sure newer laptops have more performance and can handle more things running at the same time. However if you run as much things at once as I do the above will come in handy. And ask yourself, do you use the management software anyhow? Do you really need a tray icon showing you that you pressed your finger on the touchpad? If you do like the touchpad software (which offers some customization) you can disable the tray icon. On another note disable any tray icons you don't use.

Hope this helps!

 

i smell epiphany.

 

So how do you install only the driver? The bloatware can't be de-selected.

 

If it comes in an executable file, chances are you'll have to install the bloatware, then prevent it from starting up. But if the drivers comes in folders (.inf), the device can be updated via Device Manager.

 

I always do this.....sound card, intel chipset, intel nics, broadcom nics, intel wireless, intel ingrated video.

Most of them have "drive only". When I get a new notebook...I blow away the OS build that comes with it, reload Vista, and then go get the drivers from the people that make them and not HP, DELL, ACER or Toshiba.

I also never use their lame utilties either. For the most Windows XP/Vista power settings and such are just fine. I have used RMClock to kill off CPU whine.

 

Many times you download a zip or program that takes the file you downloaded and then extracts itself to a drectory, say "C:\Temp". and then it runs the actuall program installer. When you get to the installer, close it, and go through device manager telling it to find the driver in "C:\Temp".

Some companies provide driver only installs, ATI being one of these. If all you have is an installer that doesn't let you install just the driver. I would install it, get the driver files (the installer put them somewhere on your PC), copy that to a temp directory, uninstall the product, then install the driver through device manager going to the temp directory where you copied them to.

 

But sometimes the hardware makers will send you back to the company that made your system for the latest drivers. I guess some of the drivers are custom made for the system they built.

 

Actually the driver is the same since the chip is the same. On a desktop for example if you buy an eVGA Nvidia card you can just goto nvidia.com and get their updated drivers which will work great. On laptops (and this may have finally changed) you had to do exactly what you said, get the drivers from the laptop maker/brander because the nvidia provided ones would not install. I believe the reason for this is more contract based. As in nVidia didn't want to have to support their chipsets in many different laptops that may have been implemented in custom ways.

You can google ways to use the device manufacturer drivers (with some modification of course) to work on your laptop if the driver won't work out of the box.

 

Just a note....but the latest Video Card drivers ARE NOT always the best. Just FYI.

 

This is true with my laptop with nVidia. nVidia has an update and when I tried to install it it stopped and say I don't have the correct something. Since the manufacturer's (HP) driver worked fine, I didn't pursue with the installation.

 

both ATI and NVIDIA comes first in a exe that extracts onto your harddrive (default being C:\ATI or C:\NVIDIA) then they start the exe from there to install the driver + bloatware just cancel and update the driver from device manager