I’m in the market for performance enhancers. Not the kind that get Olympic champions disqualified. The kind that will squeeze 10-20% faster speed out my laptop. Since I spend 8-10 hours a day with this thing (currently a Lenovo T61p) and consistently run a dozen applications, browsers, VM ware instances, test servers and install alpha, and beta applications that are not always the most optimized – I spend a noticeable amount of time … waiting around. As any good cook will tell you – keep your knives sharp.
If I can get my computer to run faster, and save 10 mins per hour (1 hours per day or 30 per month) that’s worth big bucks to me. So when I saw an advertisement offering 4gb of ram for only $50, I had to check it out. Of course the ad did not mention that the 4gb consists of two 2GB dims…which I already have. I thought I was going to get 8GB of ram…
Here is my current long term plan:
- 8GB of RAM. Still too expensive to invest in. I could buy an additional cheap laptop instead. When prices fall (maybe by the fall) I’ll pick some up. Research leads me to think I can achieve this in a T61p but I’m going to have to change OS to do it. I currently run Vista Ultimate and that wont cut it. So I have to install a different OS…
- Widows 7 (maybe). I’m still unsure if the better OS might be Vista 64, XP 64, or maybe Widows Server 2003 or even some Linux version and run other stuff in VM. That’s a lot of options so I could use the advice of anyone with experience.
- 128GB (or bigger) SSD (solid state drive – basically a hard drive with no moving parts that is supposed to be really, really fast). There are a lot of manufactures making these and I have a feeling prices are going to tumble. But which one? The fastest SSD? The cheapest SSD?
- What about Turbo Cache?
- What about the PCMI Expresscard slot. Can’t you put a SSD of some other performance booster in there?
- What about settings?
- What about BIOS versions?
- What about other software to manage all this tech better?
As you can see, my dream still requires more research, since I don’t even know what I want yet. But I will update this post with my findings as they develop. What have you done to improve the performance of your laptop? Got any advice?
speed is the most important
Make sure you are very careful installing the ram. after i upgrated ram on my laptop, my sound and scroll/touchpad mouse stopped working
Vista still isn't optimized for SSD. I think XP64 is your best bet. Make sure your chipset won't be a bottleneck or the SSD will get strangled. I know the nvidia chipset should give you more headroom, I'm not sure about others … heard bad things about some intel chipset throttling the speed on SSDs, but maybe that's changed.
I agree.. I think windows xp 64 will suits on your laptop.. Well I can see that you have a lot of things to work for before getting what you want.. good luck!!
128GB SSD sounds great. sounds like it will improve the performance by concept but need real user feedback for reality check
128GB SSD sounds great. sounds like it will improve the performance by concept but need real user feedback for reality check