Some Notebook Performance Enhancements

One thing I noticed during my recent trip was just how slow my notebook was running. I’ve got a new T61 Thinkpad Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz with 3GB of RAM. This baby should fly!

I do all the usual things like turning off unnecessary services etc but things were still slow. This weekend I spent some time doing some research and tuning things with good results.

One thing that goes without saying is that you need to check your Power Management settings when you’re running off battery. Some of the battery stretch settings will dramatically throttle your CPU performance.

I also found some useful information in this article on Tom’s Guide: How To Speed Up Your Snail-Slow Notebook Computer

Here are the things that worked very well for me:

1) Turn off System Restore (big gains – but you need to live and die for your backups too now)

2) Turn off Indexing Service as well uncheck the Allow Indexing Service to index this disk option in the properties for each drive.

3) Kill all Norton products; I removed Norton Ghost which I was using for as a backup solution. Make sure you use the Norton Removal Tool to get rid of all remnants of the beastly SW. Just google it.

4) A little while ago I installed BitDefender in lieu of Norton Anti-Virus and I have been very happy with it – it’s about as intuitive as any anti-virus software can get and it doesn’t seem as resource hungry as Norton.

5) Installed Acronis True Image to handle my backups.

6) Used Registry First Aid to clean up my registry and then defrag it.

7) Used Advanced System Optimizer to thin out the apps running at startup.

8) Set Diskeeper to only Automatically Defrag after hours.

Viola. My system has been much faster. BUT please before you start going crazy do a full system backup!

Side Note

If you are a Windows Mobile geek like me you’re always faced with the temptation to leave your notebook at home when you travel. This time I configured my MC35 with FlexMail (awesome software btw) so that I could connect via IMAP to our hosted Exchange account. I like that FlexMail implements IMAP as it should rather than the Microsoft incarnation which doesn’t allow you to specify which folders you want to sync. I started using the device a few days before I left to make sure I had everything I needed on it. It was completely unusable. It was slow, clunky and the battery life was pathetic. I seriously need to think twice before I recommend the MC35 to anyone of my clients. The only thing it has going for it is the price!

So I took my notebook and ditched the MC35 and it proved to be the right call. One of my clients needed an emergency fix (this only happens when you’re away right"?) and I was able to sort him out in a few hours. Sweet!