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help my old laptop run a bit better

post #1 of 14
2/16/07 at 11:15pm
Thread Starter 
well, i have a dell c600 latitude; it has 256mb ram (128mbx2) and 750mhz PIII cpu; the ram is clearly the bottleneck

anyway, i probably should be a stud and run linux but i don't wannna since i have my XP pro cd and it works


but is there anything i can do to speed things up? i install a fresh version of xp, i don't run any antivirus, i generally only run one program at a time, and cut down some of the "performance" settings so my windows are just grey boxex etc. is there anything i can change?


basically i just use it to surf the net and listen to music, and i'm gonna buy a new lappy soon, just waiting for a deal, need a stop-gap


i tried buying ram off ebay like 3 times and each time they don't fit (and they were all pc133, so screw it, i'm done trying to find more ram
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post #2 of 14
2/16/07 at 11:55pm
Thread Starter 
nm
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post #3 of 14
2/17/07 at 12:14am
At a minium double the RAM but don't spend too much money it's an old machine.
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post #4 of 14
2/17/07 at 12:15am
Thread Starter 
yes i know but old ram is expensive and i've struck out three times trying to upgrade, not going to bother

probably will just speed up buying a new one
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post #5 of 14
2/17/07 at 12:26am
Tried any spyware programs like ad-aware or spybot? If not you've prolly got some resource hogs there. Ever used a registry cleaner program? If not that will prolly give you some time as well. When's the last time you ran a de-frag? With what is most likely a small hardrive you are gonna want to keep those files in order, and preferably with 15% free.

You are right that ram is your bottle neck. Your best bet is to stop buying off of e-bay (I know it sucks, sorry…) But fatcat is right, don’t spend a lot of money on this thing. Try tigerdirect.com or zipzoomfly.com. Zipzoomfly is going to be pretty much the best prices you can find on the internet, and I’ve ordered from them several times and have no problem recommending them. Good luck, but don’t hold out too much hope for magical results.
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post #6 of 14
2/17/07 at 12:49am
Did you make the visual effects changes in "System Properties > Advanced > Visual Effects"? If so, then I assume that your changes gave you better results than letting XP adjust for best performance. The advanced tab will let you make changes to virtual memory. You should probably lock it in at 512 MB for the initial and max size to the operating system doesn't waste time resizing for required memory needs.

You can only do so much. If you get a new laptop, then you should load Linux on you old one just to see the difference.
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post #7 of 14
2/17/07 at 12:59am
If you try linux, I'd reccomend trying a distro with a light-weight (that is, lighter than KDE or Gnome) desktop environment, like XFCE. That will help minimize resource usage and should help give you a sense of improved responsiveness.
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post #8 of 14
2/17/07 at 1:06am
Thread Starter 
folks, thanks a bunch; that's some good advice

alas, i reinstalled xp/reformatted like a week ago so i definitely don't have any spspyware etc. it's just slow; in fact i'm going to reinstall again tonight; i'll definitely try linux on it when i get a new lappy; i'd love to switch to linux (and i ABSOLUTELY WILL if i ever HAVE to stop using XP), but i guess i'm still waiting for more support and more free programs; some of my favorites are windows only, and alas i really don't want to fiddle with emualation, wine or whatever; i fooled around with gentoo awhile back, and if i do linux again it'll probably be somehting simple like suse, but there's just so darn much free software for xp; i mean every bit of software i use is free, mostly opensource, and mostly better than windows soft. firefox, foobar, eac, openoffice, VLC, azureus, everything


it's pretty funny IMHO because i think XP is really just coming into it's own right now, it's taken this long for the memory requirements to even be reasonable now MS wants me to have 2gb of ram to run their ****? **** that
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post #9 of 14
2/17/07 at 1:18am
Quote:
it's pretty funny IMHO because i think XP is really just coming into it's own right now, it's taken this long for the memory requirements to even be reasonable now MS wants me to have 2gb of ram to run their ****? **** that
Absolutely! It just started to be like, hey, XP CAN be cool! lol, nope! Here comes vista!
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post #10 of 14
2/17/07 at 1:46am
Well since I cant delete this I guess I'll just leave a pointless post.
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post #11 of 14
2/17/07 at 2:03am
Thread Starter 
hey, but too slow for my subsciption to send me an email with your orig. post


and yeah, i'm all about open source, all about linux, all about putting windows out of business, but right now the damn thing just works and i don't have to fool with it, and i even NEED windows **** like ****ing internet explorer to access a website for my school........pain; windows isn't getting supported by me, though alas neither is linux; unless i buy a new laptop which of course will have windows and then i'm being evil again...........
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post #12 of 14
2/17/07 at 4:24am
I just took my aging PowerBook from 512MB to 1GB. It made a huge difference. Also, I'd cut down on the amount of processes running and drop the number of colors used in the display panel. That'll lighten the load.

By the way, PC133 SODIMMs come in both 144 and 168 pin configurations. You probably picked up the wrong ones.

Uzziah, why don't you do a little homework on what kind of RAM your laptop uses? If you head over to crucial.com, you can run through their selector thingie and find out what your machine uses.

If you use 144 pin SODIMMs, let me know. I've got two 256MB sticks I don't need and I'll send them to you. PM me if you can use them.
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post #13 of 14
2/17/07 at 4:30am
Thread Starter 
strangely enough, no; each of the sodimm ram chips i got were the correct pin-arrangement, but the compartment in the laptop wasn't quite big enough to fit the sticks; for some damn reason the chips that dell used are a bit smaller


and yeah, i did check crucial, but it didn't help me avoid the "slightly wrong sized" ram problem

heck ya, man, i could definitely use that ram; let me know

the 168pin stuff is not so-dimm at all, it's desktop ram
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post #14 of 14
2/17/07 at 4:44am
Just do it.... upgrade.

The new internet has made your laptop obsolete. The new web pages and multimedia are so demanding for memory and cpu cycle.

Just close your eyes and go for a new dual core....
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