Laptop dead slow

[taffyracer]

My wife has a Sony Vaio laptop that is frustratingly slow, it's only got a small amount of ram so i need to upgrage it, where is the best place to buy this sort of stuff, I only want decent stuff?

Also, is there anything else I can do speed it up?

[Noger]

Have always found Crucial to be good and reliable.

http://www.crucial.com/uk/?gclid=CPKw_uX04ZACFQXkl...

As for speeding it up, depends on the OS, XP or Vista ?

Sony load a huge amount of crud onto their machines, so a few hours deinstalling crud and shutting down the various unused services will help.

[taffyracer]

It's XP home i think, definitely XP, will try crucial

[kevin63]

Another one here for Crucial, the web site is great, and the service was fantastic too with good prices.

[sstein]

taffyracer said:

It's XP home i think, definitely XP, will try crucial

If it's XP, either get in and gut it out and stop all services you don't need running. Alternatively, if it's been a while since it's had a reinstall then that may help.

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Stuart

[taffyracer]

sstein said:

taffyracer said:

It's XP home i think, definitely XP, will try crucial

If it's XP, either get in and gut it out and stop all services you don't need running. Alternatively, if it's been a while since it's had a reinstall then that may help.

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Stuart

How do I gut it out?

[sstein]

taffyracer said:

sstein said:

taffyracer said:

It's XP home i think, definitely XP, will try crucial

If it's XP, either get in and gut it out and stop all services you don't need running. Alternatively, if it's been a while since it's had a reinstall then that may help.

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Stuart

How do I gut it out?

To start with go into Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Services and then disable the services you dont need.

The services I have running are:

Automatic Updates
AVG Antivirus services
DCOM Server Processes
DHCP Client (I need this for net access, you may not)
Event Log
Plug & Play
RPC
System Restore
Windows Audio

The rest are set to diabled, which you can do by double clicking a service and stopping it, then set startup to disabled.

Also you want to find out what is running on startup. You can do this by going to Start->Run and type in regedit.

Go to these keys,

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> Software -> Microsoft -> Windows -> Current Version and look in the Run and Run Once folders. This contains the stuff that is starting up, delete the keys on the right for stuff you don't need.

Also download CCleaner and run that, this will delete a lot of stuff from windows and various temp folders.

You could also run Disk Cleanup and Defrag (although its debatable how much difference a defrag makes on an NTFS system, I doubt it's a great deal).

You can then go into the windows folder if you are feeling brave and delete a LOT of it. I have been stripping my windows installation down and not counting the $NT_UninstallKB folders (those were the first things gone), I have removed over 8,500 files from the Windows and Windows/System32 folder, that is over 2.1 GB.

If you have norton dump that as well and get something like AVG. You can get a tool to remove Norton from the Symantec website.

Also, have a look for sysInternals autoruns software, that will let you see which processes are running and from where on the system.

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Stuart

Edited by sstein on Sunday 6th January 17:43

[taffyracer]

ok, the only problem with deleting files is that I simply do not know which is needed and which is not, any rules to that?

[sstein]

With regard to deleting individual system32 files, it will be down to which programs you have installed. However, there are a few folders which should be safe to delete from windows.

If your windows is stable and all the hotfixes are stable you can delete all the folders in the Windows folder which start with $NT_UninstallKB.... These are folders which windows creates that allows you to uninstall the XP hotfixes. Why you would ever need to uninstall these is beyond me so I delete these folders and saved a LOAD of space.

The windows folder also contains folders called ie7 and ie7updates. On my system these 2 folders were over 140MB combined, this is crazy for a browser. I can delete these folders and IE still works perfectly. Again, they seem to contain files which allows the ie7 updates to be removed.

I also deleted the folder from windows called $hf_mig$ with no side effects. This saved 405 MB.

I also deleted the system32/dllcache folder which saved over 400MB. Windows will recreate this with the latest dll files, but mines is sitting at 22MB now. So still a saving of 380MB. You can also delete the contents of the cursors folder, and the media folder as I have no windows sounds turned on.

I deleted the srchasst folder in Windows as well, this is an interesting one. When I removed this the windows search facility still works but it reverts back to the NT style So the annoying little dog is gone and it seems to be a bit quicker.

If you want to delete files in the windows folder then you will have to turn off windows file protection. Easiest way to do this is to google XPlite, install that and run it. It has an option to disable the file protection.

You could also get rid of all screensavers, wallpapers etc

How large is the HD in the laptop?

It should also be safe to delete any file which ends in .old and .tmp but CCleaner should get rid of these. When you run CCleaner tick the hotfix uninstallers option.

Be aware though, if you are unsure as to what to delete and make a mistake and delete a crucial file windows WILL NOT BOOT!!!!

Check out this forum for a pretty in depth guide to slimming down windows

http://www.bold-fortune.com/forums/index.php?s=ed4f5837c4c031e2f99a53f55d1ca3d6&showforum=13 



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Stuart

Im in the process of creating a spreadsheet with all the files I delete, and don't delete from windows. Here it is so far, it only contains system32 files which start with A-B right now. http://www.speed-shot.co.uk/sys32.xls 

Edited by sstein on Sunday 6th January 20:00

Edited by sstein on Sunday 6th January 20:05

[taffyracer]

Ok great thank you, i'll only delete those mentioned and see how we go

cheers

[sstein]

You don't have to delete them, I created a windows folder on the desktop and cut and pasted them there, I could then move stuff back that caused anything to moan. Once it was running fine I dumped that folder to a dvd.

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Stuart

Edited by sstein on Sunday 6th January 20:49

[sstein]

I now have my windows XP install down to 1.77 GB



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Stuart