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Laptop Optimization
Optimizing your new laptop
Now that you’ve bought a new machine, you're going to
want it to perform like a fine-tuned race car. Here's how you get there. By
Prashant L Rao
Laptops generally come with loads of junk put there by the vendor because software
companies paid the vendor to bundle their programs with the machine. For the
greater part, these are applications that you don’t want and merely slow
down your machine and take up valuable space.
Taking out the trash
Make a trip to the Control Panel’s Add/Remove Programs applet in XP (Uninstall
a program in Vista). Here you can remove anything from Oberon Media (game trials),
Microsoft Works (it used to be a good program but now it’s an suite of
productivity apps that won’t let you save easily in Word/Excel formats
and lacks something as basic as paragraph styles) as well as any trial software
that you have no intention of buying anyway. You can save gigabytes of space
on your hard drive and remove lots of stuff that loads up every time your laptop
boots by removing this stuff.
Use msconfig to disable stuff that runs on startup
This is a tool that’s built into Windows (XP, Vista and 7). Run Msconfig
(Start-Run, type “msconfig” without the quotes) and go to the Startup
tab. Here you can deselect any application that you don’t need. If you’re
not sure, disable items one at a time keeping track of what you are disabling,
restart and if everything’s working fine, leave that item deselected. You
can always reenable stuff later if you have to.
Ccleaner: a great tool to free up space and clean out detritus
This handy piece of freeware lets you clean out all the rubbish that Windows
and popular apps like Office, Acrobat etc create on a regular basis. You can
just run it using the default settings and free up space and speed up your machine.
Get it from www.ccleaner.com.
The startup tab of the built-in msconfig utility lets you disable unwanted
apps that start with Windows whether you want them to or not |
Ccleaner can automatically clean most of the junk that Windows and other
apps leave behind and you can even set it to run every time the laptop
boots so that your PC’s always trim and speedy |
Disabling Services
If you are a moderately proficient PC user you can try disabling services that
aren’t needed on your machine. By default XP and Vista run lots of services
that will never be used on a particular machine. These suck up system resources
and disabling them or even setting them to start manually instead of automatically
can help speed up a system. To modify Services related settings go to Start-Run
and type “services.msc” without the quotes and you’ll get a list
of all the services that are available in Windows. Clicking on any of these
will give you a description of what it does.
Some services that can safely be disabled are the IP Helper
service that is only required for those folks who are running IPv6 apps over
an IPv4 network (no one outside a research lab would be using this one), IPSec
Policy Agent (only required if you use IPSec VPN), Terminal Services (only useful
if you’re running a thin client or want to use the Remote Desktop feature),
TPM Base Services (only required if your machine has a fingerprint scanner that
works with the TPM module on the motherboard)... If you want to disable only
third-party services (which is safer), then simply run msconfig and go to the
Services tab where there’s a checkbox that lets you Hide all Microsoft
Services. Of the ones that are left, some are obviously necessary as they enable
vital hardware running on your machine, others you can try disabling and if
things work just fine without them, well, you’ve just squeezed out a bit
more of performance.
prashant.rao@expressindia.com
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