More Thoughts on Laptop/Netbook...

So I had decided that I was originally going to get myself a nice little netbook right after the new year.

I started looking into some things that I could do to maybe get my laptop running a bit better, and I came across a few things.

First of all, I found a program called CCleaner. It runs a sweep of all kinds of things that a virus or spyware scanner doesn't do. It cleans out all kinds of things that are taking up space. I freed up over 1.5 gigabytes of information by using this program. I then used it to run a registry cleaner, and it found nearly 1,000 total errors in my registry on my computer. So I fixed all of those with it.

I then ran a scandisk and a disk defrag. After all of this I found some programs that were constantly running that were taking up valuable system resources. I killed those programs and then shut everything down and brought it back up.

Wow, what a difference it made. The laptop is running like new again...but I did find a pretty major flaw in my system. It only has 504 megabytes of RAM. I then checked my system performance and found that even with only one window of Firefox running I was using 498 megabytes of memory. So basically, I am maxing out the RAM that this computer has. I went over to Crucial.com to check what they had to offer, and I found that I can double my RAM to 1 gigabyte for $30...or I could go all the way to 2 gigs for $59.

I did some research and asked a few questions on a message board and found out that if I were to go to the 1 gig of RAM I would probably notice a MAJOR increase in performance on the machine. The guys said that going to 2 gigs might be a bit overkill, but it couldn't hurt. So right now I'm thinking about ordering the 1 gigabyte of RAM in the next few days and installing it to see what kind of difference it makes.



Basically, the way I'm looking at it is if I can spend $30 or $60 to get this laptop back to the performance that I would like it to have, well, that's a lot better than spending a few hundred on a netbook. I do like the idea of the netbook, but I also really like my laptop...so if I can save it I think I'd rather do that.

So I'll be ordering at least 1 gig of RAM in the next few days...and I'll be hoping that makes this thing work quite a bit better!!!