Rejuvenating my computer

I bought my current laptop more than 3 years ago. At that time, the configuration seemed reasonably high end with windows XP prefessional with 512 MB RAM and I felt smug in believing I had future proofed my self. I ignored Moore's law at my own peril (computing power doubles every 18 months).

Over the next 3 years my laptop served me fairly well. I installed a bunch of useful and not so useful programs. As time went by I started finding the performance deteriorating. The boot up times starting crawling upto a point where it became excruciatingly long. The time to load any application started stretching to minutes. My hard disk kept working harder and harder but to no avail. Tethering at the brink of my patience, I decided to take my chances. I was not ready to accept that the same programs, IE6, MS excel etc. should take longer on the same machine where it took just seconds to open.

The results were surprisingly pleasing. Here is what I did and its relative success.
- Defragment the disk. Marginal success. I gained just a few seconds improvement over my boot up and application load times but nothing worth elaborating.
- Uninstall some applications I did not need. That improved the bootup time a bit.

Then I realized, if I needed to improve my bootup timings, I need to manage start up programs. The way to do it is
- Press Windows+R and key in "msconfig, and hit enter. System Configuration Utility will open up.
- Go straight to Start Up Tab and you will find a list of all the programs that kick start every time you bootup your system.
- Google each name you think is critical to booting and proper running of computer. I searched and disable a bunch of stuff such as Yahoo Messenger, Google tool bar and so on.
- AFter I had saved the changes I was asked to restart the computer and Viola! My startup time reduced from about 4 minutes to less than 3 minutes

Enthused with my success I went a step further and clicked on services tab. just next to Startup and unchecked every service that I did not need. I realized that MY-SQL db, Apache Server etc. a lot of applications were being started as service and I really did not need them now.

Unchecking them and restarting the server did the trick. The start up times got down to less than a 60 sec from 3 min. Wow! I said This is cool. One added benefit was my start up memory also reduced and that allowed me to load applications faster. Earlier I used to run out of 512 MB in just 1 browser session. Now, I could open multiple sessions together.

Now what ever I dish out, my laptop handles with ease. I think I just added a couple of years of life to my computer without spending any moolah!