Speeding up a low memory PC

Jon12345

Jon12345

Jon12345

Associate
Joined
5 Feb 2003
Posts
365
I have a laptop with Win XP and 128mb. Don't want to buy memory for it because its due for a replacement soon and the memory for it is expensive as its old.

Any decent articles or recommendations for speeding up this laptop? It's all down to the memory I think because of the constant hard drive thrashing.

It is running avg virus checker, which obvioulsy takes up memory. But I need that on there!

Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Jon
 
Removed all the junk from startup?

There's sites dedicated to people getting their running processes down to virtually nothing, I'm sure someone can point you to one.

Another thing, in My Computer, have you tweaked it to be optimized for performance, rather than it wasting memory on making the menus pop up smoothly? :)
 
Turn off auto update and system restore, that helps too. You'll just have to remember to make backups and run windows update yourself. What sort of tray programs do you have running?
 
What memory does it take? I'm sure you can pick up old RAM on the bay, for next to nothing.

The best thing you could probably do for that computer is change the harddrive to a 7,200rpm one. Seeing as you mention there is lots of HD thrashing, this would be one of two good upgrades for that machine.
 
refresh said:
The HDD thrashing sounds like too little RAM and lots of paging happening.
Click to expand...

yup

use cpu-z to find out what type of ram it needs, it'll be under a tenner for 256mb ram

use blackviper to disable services that you don't need

increase pagefile size to 384-512mb, disable system restore, remove anything from startup that you don't need, do you really need antivirus on there? just slowing it down.. turn off all eye candy (press winkey + break, advanced, performance)
 
Best bet would be to use Nlite and make a nice slimmed down version of xp and whack that on there :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom