Anything to speed my laptop up?

[SnowSurfer]

I have a ibm/lenovo t43p labtop 1.86ghz 1 gig of ram. I did my usually bit of uninstalling all the crap i dont need but the thing is still slow as molasses. IBM installs god knows how many extra ties ins.

Can anyone point me in the right direction of how to speed this sucker up. For instance, I can barely use photoshop on it unless its plugged in.

thanks, snow

[_=DeltaForce=_]

I would re-install windows and then upgrade to ram to the as much as possible. This will definitely boot the performance and you will notice it!

[SnowSurfer]

i cant reformat because i have settings and stuff that i need to connect to the shared servers on my schools domain. :( sadness. I thought 1 gig of ram would be enough

bah humbug im installing most of the ibm crap right now

[mechmike0034]

http://www.optimizeguides.com

[clutchy]

i cant reformat because i have settings and stuff that i need to connect to the shared servers on my schools domain. :( sadness. I thought 1 gig of ram would be enough

bah humbug im installing most of the ibm crap right now

yeah, i thought a gig of ram would have been enough also... go figure... Maybe your hard drive needs a boost or something, who knows...

do you have any idea how much throttling down the chip does unplugged?

[SnowSurfer]

unplugged it goes down to 735 mghz (or around there) damn you intel , im debating selling this laptop and getting a tablet mmm juicy :)

[mechmike0034]

Can you turn off the power management in both Windows and in the BIOS? This should help, admittedly at the expense of battery life while running unplugged...

[Devhux]

Can you turn off the power management in both Windows and in the BIOS? This should help, admittedly at the expense of battery life while running unplugged...

You'd be able to with either of these programs:

Notebook Hardware Control (http://www.pbus-167.com/chc.htm)

or

SpeedswitchXP (http://www.diefer.de/speedswitchxp/)

Both of these let you run the laptop in either Max. Performance, Max Battery, Battery Optimized, or Dynamic Switching.

[johnnymk]

I have a Toshiba 1.5 GHz Celeron 256 MB RAM. No complaints whatsoever, unless I get spyware or a virus.

[zero2dash]

I have a Toshiba 1.5 GHz Celeron 256 MB RAM. No complaints whatsoever, unless I get spyware or a virus.

:agree:
I've ran more programs (lot of Adobe work) on slower hardware (P3 866 with 768 PC133 RAM) and wouldn't complain one bit about the performance I had.

I bet you've got an infection...spyware, virus, trojan...something.
Either that or you need to run Disk Defrag.

I have an Athlon XP 2200+ (clock speed of 1.8) with 768 RAM on my laptop and it's quick as hell. Do some spyware/virus scans and run defrag and you should see a boost; you're not having a "lack of ram" issue that would make it run slow.

[SnowSurfer]

its seems quicker at the moment, the laptop started with 70 processes running, im now at 44 processes

[reycer94587]

I would definately follow MechMike's advice about turning off the power management. A big hint is that it slows down when using the battery. The Pentium M chip uses SpeedStep technology that lowers CPU speed dynamically to conserve battery. Under Windows Power Management, set your profile for 'Max Performance'. Also, make sure that you do not block any of your fans, your system may be getting hot. I just bought a USB powered laptop cooler from fry's for $10.


I have a Dell Inspiron 2200 with a Pentium M 1.6 and have no complaints about processing speed whatsoever. It has a 5400RPM HD and only 512MB of RAM.

[Jeffbx]

unplugged it goes down to 735 mghz (or around there) damn you intel , im debating selling this laptop and getting a tablet mmm juicy :)

Dang, if speed in Photoshop is your issue, a tablet PC should be the furthest thing from your mind. Those things are great for taking notes & surfing the web, but they are no speed demons.

As everyone else says, check your running processes. 1GB should be plenty for Photoshop unless you're working with really huge images.

What speed is your HD? An upgrade to a 7200RPM could help things.

Also, TAKE YOUR AC ADAPTER WITH YOU! Plug it in when you can - running in performance mode with full speed on the processor takes a lot of power.

[LegendKiller]

I always end up shutting down stuff like Help or any other processes that are set to "automatic" that I don't normally use. I would also run a registry cleaner, check your "msconfig" startup area, I know adobe runs some stuff on startup that isn't really needed, as does office.

Also, go into your pagefile and set it to 1.5x ram, fixed. Before you do that make sure you have defragmented your HDD.

[mechmike0034]

You'd be able to with either of these programs:

Notebook Hardware Control (http://www.pbus-167.com/chc.htm)

Dude, this is a KILLER app! Thanks! :thumbup:

[Devhux]

Dude, this is a KILLER app! Thanks! :thumbup:

No problem. I've been using it on my XPS2, and it works great. If you're feeling REALLY adventerous and want to maximize battery life, play around with the CPU Voltage settings (undervolting). Under battery power, my Pentium-M 2GHz is happy running at only 0.812V (instead of 0.988V by default). I could probably go even lower, but I haven't tried. This has given me about 15 miinutes more of battery life.

(This is when the CPU is operating with a 6x multiplier (800MHz).

[SnowSurfer]

thanks for the help guys, the laptop is def faster now, that notebook hardware control is nice. I was getting pissed because i would be sitting outside or something connected to my schools wireless and it would take a good 10 count to open firefox, etc. It was impossible to get any work done. I have 44 processes running at the moment, the thing is a beast!