James Casey Posted June 21, 2011 Share Posted June 21, 2011 Me and my wife have had a Compaq laptop for about five years now. Inevitably, it's starting to creak a bit and has gone from being mine to being our to being hers. We're looking at buying a replacement in the next couple of weeks, but before we do that I want to have one last go at cleaning hers up (including, alas, taking TEW07 off it - I'll have to back up my saves first). Mainly my wife uses it for Shockwave games and light web browsing but she'd also like it for WoW, which it can do, at a push, but only with everything on the lowest settings and with a single digit fps. If there's a way to get it running a little quicker, I'm looking for it. I know a fair bit about computer maintenance, but this one has been neglected for the last couple of years so I think I'll need to go back to scratch. With that in mind, I'm looking for recommendations on how to get it running at a fairly reasonable speed (for its age, anyway). Anything from defragging to clearing out the startup (I already use Soluto for that - is there something better?), if you have any tips, please share them. And please don't think that something might be too simple - there really is no such thing. About the only thing I can't do is reinstall XP, and that's because I no longer have any idea where the disks are (ways around that might be useful, too ) Thanks in advance for any help! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JackKnifed72 Posted June 22, 2011 Share Posted June 22, 2011 Strip absolutely EVERYTHING you caN off of your hard drive. Try a seperate harddrive if you can find one cheap. I found a 250 gig on sale for $55. I have a year old HP laptop with 255 GB hardrive and I never let it go below 180 gigs free...I "offload" all music, photos, text files to my plug in harddrive. Defrag after any long session, particularly anything involving graphics and/or audio files. Consider a cheap virus protection program, as adware, spyware etc will wreak havoc on your system. When running games, media player etc, go to the task manager and disable all processes that are listed as 'USER' (you may have a different name here) except for Windows explorer and windows task manager...you may have an audio enhancement of some sort there, leave that running...that will help with framerate issues, loadtime etc when using various programs (WoW). Sadly, the physical limitations of the video and sound cards in a laptop may mean your just not gonna get it running much better than it is now ... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Linsolv Posted June 22, 2011 Share Posted June 22, 2011 You might consider opening up the back panel and trying to blow out the dust. Most laptops have a removable panel on the bottom for such a purpose, and like desktops they accumulate dust that can cause significant slowdowns. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wallbanger Posted June 22, 2011 Share Posted June 22, 2011 You might consider opening up the back panel and trying to blow out the dust. Most laptops have a removable panel on the bottom for such a purpose, and like desktops they accumulate dust that can cause significant slowdowns. Yep, the dust buildup prevents heat from venting properly, which can impact the CPU. On a similar note, a USB cooling mat is a good and fairly cheap investment - I use a Belkin model for my laptop - and I see a noticeable difference in performance when I don't have the pad. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JackKnifed72 Posted June 22, 2011 Share Posted June 22, 2011 Yep, the dust buildup prevents heat from venting properly, which can impact the CPU. On a similar note, a USB cooling mat is a good and fairly cheap investment - I use a Belkin model for my laptop - and I see a noticeable difference in performance when I don't have the pad. Was not aware of that, will have to grab a USB mat, I do a fair amount of music mixing on my laptop and nothing sucks worse than being several hours into a mixdown only to have the tr-a-c-k sta-rt t-o ski-p a-nd st-utt-er and be forced to close the program!!!! ... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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