Increasing compuers speed

[jack straw]

any ideas on how to increase the speed of a laptop? it's a dell, just about 6 months old and it's a piece of shit. $1,000 dosn't get much today...

so any ideas on how to increase the speed?

[Commander Thor]

If you've been using it alot, do a defrag, and a disk cleanup.
Adding RAM can also increase your speed.

[The Freed]

And laptop RAM is cheap .

[Bougainvillea]

Update! 8 D

[SEA_GULL]

Presuming you have XP

Change the computer theme to 98 (This is obviously less on the graphical side, thus decreasing load time.

Download a program called C Cleaner, you won't regret it..... open it up, go to Tools on the side menu, then select start up, here you have all the processors which run and slow down you computer when the computer starts up, when you disable these be very careful not to touch any with "C:\\Windows" or any to do with you sound card or Antivirus.

Clear out all you cookies, Temp, cache and all that jazz.

Defrag you computer every once in a while, this also create space.

I hope this helps

[DouggyO.o]

Lets see, You can get more ram to put inside your computer. You can stop your computer from booting certain services by clicking run-->MSCONFIG and if you really feel like it, over clocking your video card and cpu will boost computer speed(!*warning, this may cause over heating problems*!)

[sebbie]

You might want to consider upgrading the hardware inside the computer. Upgrading the RAM and processor will have a huge impact on your machines performance. I would suggest you do this.

As for minor tweaks, delete/ uninstall any software or files that you don't need. Then run a disk de fragmentation. This will sort out your free space on your hard drive and get rid of fragmented files.

It may also be worth running a full system scan with your antivirus software, this can help to get rid of spyware, viruses etc which may also be having an impact on your performance.

[dem.re.cmd.exe]

I doubt that a processor upgrade would be possible since it's only 6 months old... I'm going to assume it has a dual core which is pretty standard among new dell laptops (my inspiron from December has one.) You could go intel i7 :P but I think it has a 900 something socket type instead of the dual core's 775.

Also you'd have to make sure you could even upgrade your RAM. (I bet you can by a little bit). The motherboard is made for a certain amount of RAM so if there's a stick with an excess amount it will either ignore the whole stick of ignore the excess RAM on the stick. It depends on the board etc but mostly it will ignore the stick.

So my only advice is run anti-virus and spyware checks often, delete programs you don't use often (maybe store them on a removable hard drive if you don't want to have to reinstall. I keep my large files on an external hard drive because they can be a pain in the ass). Defrag can help. All of this depends on what you do with your computer and what problems it may have. If you have any questions PM me or something, I log on every once in a while (email notifications if you PM so I'll get it in an instant since I'm on my email a lot). Good Luck :D

[Commander Thor]

I doubt that a processor upgrade would be possible since it's only 6 months old... I'm going to assume it has a dual core which is pretty standard among new dell laptops (my inspiron from December has one.) You could go intel i7 :P but I think it has a 900 something socket type instead of the dual core's 775.
They don't make a i7 for laptops. O_o
And the socket type is 1366 for i7 anyway.

Also you'd have to make sure you could even upgrade your RAM. (I bet you can by a little bit). The motherboard is made for a certain amount of RAM so if there's a stick with an excess amount it will either ignore the whole stick of ignore the excess RAM on the stick. It depends on the board etc but mostly it will ignore the stick.
Laptops aren't dual-channel like most desktops are. You can add a stick, and it will recognize it, and use it.
Most Dell mainboards have a limit of 4GB total memory. (Which translates to about 3.25GB of RAM)

So my only advice is run anti-virus and spyware checks often, delete programs you don't use often (maybe store them on a removable hard drive if you don't want to have to reinstall. I keep my large files on an external hard drive because they can be a pain in the ass). Defrag can help. All of this depends on what you do with your computer and what problems it may have. If you have any questions PM me or something, I log on every once in a while (email notifications if you PM so I'll get it in an instant since I'm on my email a lot). Good Luck :D

This part... I agree with.

[Aηdy]

TBH, just back up and run the recovery CD. I usually reformat every 2-3 months otherwise it just gets slower and slower.

[wolfman775]

I know this threads a tad old.

The best option is to uphrade your ram, you would not belive how much difference 0.6Gb of ram makes!
Or you could get linux.

[Antares]

Mine is starting to freeze up. I got it about 6 months ago and I don't understand how much wear I put on it.

But yea, I defrag and I recently did a disk cleanup...kinda useless and I accidentally deleted some stuff I didn't want to.

Anyways, do that and I guess it may help...

[geoff5093]

As someone else mentioned, in addition to running disk cleanup and defrag one of the best things to do is go to Start > Run > msconfig. Dell puts so much bloatware on their laptops that even when new it runs slow, so I would either remove the programs completely or just remove them from startup via msconfig.

[Donkey]

TBH, just back up and run the recovery CD. I usually reformat every 2-3 months otherwise it just gets slower and slower.
This.