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Wanted to buy a new laptop, instead I made mine faster for cheap, here's how.

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280Z28:
I've been having lots of trouble with my laptop being slow. I use it at work all day and it's been hindering my performance there. :( I was going to buy a nice new Athlon 64 FX60 with a 17" monitor, but I decided to see what I could do to mine for cheaper. It's a P4 3.0 with HT, 800MHZ FSB, dual DDR, 7200rpm 60gb hard drive, the works. It's a couple years old, but it should be fast enough for me to work with.

I noticed I was constantly running out of memory. 512mb is not enough for development. AT ALL. So I started by ordering 2gb Corsair PC3200 DDR for it. That's my only expense in what I did. $250 is so much cheaper than a $3500 laptop!

I defragmented my hard drive. I didn't realize my scheduled task for that was disabled (now fixed). I had 120,000+ excess fragments!

Delete unused files. I was down to under 1gb free space. :( With the help of Treesize (freeware version) I was able to rapidly free up 10GB extra drive space. I highly recommend this easy to use piece of freeware.

In one sitting I have a whole new machine (functionality wise).

Lesson to be learned: (fairly) simple maintainance of your computer pays off in the long run, and keeps you from having to spend money on tons of new hardware just to keep things usable. :cool:

280Z28:
BTW, I'm not new to computers at all, I've just been lazy. :o

Michael:

--- Quote from: 280Z28 on February 03, 2006, 10:24:20 am ---Lesson to be learned: (fairly) simple maintainance of your computer pays off in the long run, and keeps you from having to spend money on tons of new hardware just to keep things usable. :cool:

--- End quote ---

I normally take care of my notebook, but this does not prevent it to stop working :). Anyway, you are right. A bit of maintenance, some additional memory and may be a larger hard-disk can in most of the cases increase the performance of your "old" notebook. Regarding the hard-disk is the thing somehow funny. I have an hard-disk of GB, but when the free space is under 15-20% then the notebook works quite bad.

Michael

TDragon:

--- Quote from: 280Z28 on February 03, 2006, 10:24:20 am ---I noticed I was constantly running out of memory. 512mb is not enough for development. AT ALL.

--- End quote ---
This, my friend, is indeed the primary factor in computer performance. Consider the following scenario.

The computer I use at work came advertised as a workhorse, with a screamin' P4 2.8Ghz processor. My home PC, on the other hand, is putting along with a budget Sempron 2600+, running at 1.6Ghz. One PC takes 5 minutes to compile a clean install of Code::Blocks' SVN sources, the other takes 20.

Oh, did you think my work PC took 5 minutes? Think again. The P4 uses up all of its 512Mb of RAM in a matter of milliseconds, and spends the next 19+ minutes chugging away in virtual memory on the hard drive. Little Sempron, on the other hand, has another 256Mb stick of DDR to work with, and it sails through never touching the virtual memory.

If your computer has to use Windows' virtual memory at all during the course of the day, buying more RAM is the smartest upgrade you could do.

Michael:

--- Quote from: TDragon on February 03, 2006, 03:15:52 pm ---If your computer has to use Windows' virtual memory at all during the course of the day, buying more RAM is the smartest upgrade you could do.

--- End quote ---

I fully agree :). I have remarked this when I have added 512 MB to the notebook I used at work (for a total of 1 GB). Compared to my private notebook (512 MB - 64 MB shared video ram), the difference in compiling C::B is relatively huge (around 12-15 minutes). The processor speed is approximately the same for both notebooks.

Michael

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