Speeding up my laptop.

Cache-man

Cache-man

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I finally managed to get myself a laptop the other day.
It's nothing new, but it should be just great for doing uni work on the train and whatever.
The only trouble is, it's just a little bit slow, and I would like to know what I can do to get the best possible performance out of it.

The laptop is a IBM Thinkpad A20m with 500MHz P3 CPU and 64Mb RAM and 5 Gb HDD. It's also got a CDRW-DVD combo drive as well as a floppy.
The max screen resolution is only 800x600 which is a bit of a pain.
I've already formatted the HDD, and freshly installed a copy of Windows XP Pro SP2.
I've read the manual and have found out that the max amount of memory is 320Mb, so if I can get a 256Mb stick off ebay then that should give the best performance boost, right?

What else can I do?
 
5GB hard drive, just to let you know that is really about 4.8GB and windows will have 2-3GB of it.

How much free do you have?

you will need SODIMM RAM, very low speed though.

apart from that, there is nothing much you can do; the CPU is just not powerful.

How much did it cost?
 
I'm not sure if you could speed it up massively - but a 20/30GB Drive and more memory would be a great boost. I've run WinXP on a P366, 64MB Ram, 4.5GB laptop before and it ran acceptable :)
 
My Lap Top (Toshiba CT) is only a P600 but i managed to get a hard drive for it up to 20 GB

I have Windows 2000, prob a better bet on a dated machine like that

He he I use it for work and once plotted 50000 water pipe bursts across Wales, poor thing steam was coming out of it! It managed it though! lol
 
a new HD and the RAM will make it better, try disabling unecessary tasks in the boot sequence and removing all the parts of XP you dont need
 
I personally would suggest you give up on XP and fall back on the Windows 2000 or the best considering its spec Windows 98SE. The speed and Ram are going to make this machine very slow and crash intermitantly. You will be having a tough time running most software. Multi-tasking would be impossible.

I have a machine in the office which is IBM T20 which is basically a spare machine in use the production department and I tested it for Windows XP but was not happy even though it has a P3 800MHz processor and 192Mb Ram and 20 GB hard disk.

If you can manage that would be great but this is just my humble suggestion.
 
Thanks for all your suggestions so far.
I have already disabled all of the visual XP effects, but I will now look into the startup directory, and see what else i don't need. I would rather keep XP SP2 than step down to 2000, but if its still slow once i've got a larger HDD and max memory for it then it's something i know i can consider.

This laptop was a freebie by the way. My dad has got a new one, and given me his old one, so my intention is to just try to get the best performance i can out of it and just use it for uni work on the train etc. I'll only be typing assigments and coding the odd website, and maybe listening to the odd MP3 in the background, so there'll be no gaming or hardcore graphics work - Thats what my rig at home is for!
:)
 
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