How to speed up laptop

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gebbel

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I have seen several sites that have software to speed up your PC by as much a 5 times. I have only seen sites where you can download for free but have to pay after a trial period. Anyone any experience with such software...does it work and are there any proper freeware sites to do so?
 
At best it's snake-oil and at worst you'll end up with malware, crapware, crippleware or 'let-us-spy-on-you-and-connect-your-credit-card-to-our-selected-trading-partners-ware'.

First thing that will make a laptop go faster is to plug it into the mains. The CPU runs at half speed when on batteries.

After that, make sure you've got 1gb of RAM and get rid of unnecessary background programs.
 
ClubMan said:
Are you sure about that? Not all laptops/CPUs support dynamic clocking as far as I know.
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True enough, but where applicable, it's amazing the difference it makes.

Forgot to ask if the OP is running Vista....in which case more drastic measures (such as upgrading to XP) may be required.
 
most important - what Virus Scanner are you running ? Norton especially is crippling for laptops - also check whether you have it set to do a full scan every day - that would dramatically slow down laptop
 
Technologist said:
True enough, but where applicable, it's amazing the difference it makes.

Forgot to ask if the OP is running Vista....in which case more drastic measures (such as upgrading to XP) may be required.
Click to expand...

technically downgrading surely?
 
Well how long is it since you have re-formatted the Laptop?
I do mine twice a year.
Just backup all your important docs and take note of what programs you actually use and then re-install windows.
It's amazing the amount of stuff that is prob on the laptop that you dont need.
Also as mentioned look at upgrading your RAM if possible

Mik
 
As well as all the above good suggestions re: avoiding those "speed up your computer" programs, upgrading memory and stopping background processes, run crap cleaner frequently to keep temp files to a minimum and your registry clean. Note, you can also use crap cleaner to control what programs are started when your laptop boots.
I found a little tool some time ago called startup delayer which speeds up your boot time by doing what it says on the tin by delaying (or giving you the option to bypass the startup of) startup programs.
 
There are plenty of reputable sites out there with useful tips on speeding up a sluggish computer and which don't try to sell you snake oil - or anything for that matter. However you do need to investigate and get an idea of where the potential problems may lie. Some of the speedup tweaks can be arcane and yield marginal improvements when there may be better opportunities for getting a bigger bang for your buck in terms of optimisation. I find ProcessExplorer good for this - e.g. for identifying processes or threads that are hogging resources (CPU, I/O, physical and virtual memory, etc.). Once you get an idea of what's taking up resources you can see about improving matters. I'm sure that there are good tutorials out there on using the likes of ProcessExplorer and similar tools to look into this sort of thing. Upgrading from 512MB to 1GB or more should also help (and you may need to reconfigure your virtual memory pagefile settings when you do this) but doesn't obviate the need for doing this sort of investigation.
 
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