Life as I find it

I got myself a new Lenovo laptop with a Vista pre installed. I thought this would be the ultimate in freedom, etc. Unfortunately, it is not so. My laptop runs like a bullock cart even with 1GB of RAM. Sad.

I am used to super speeds with 1GB on my desktop. So what do I do. I thought of trashing the Vista and installing a Linux OS instead, like on my desktop. But then, there is a new problem. My Ubuntu Fiesty Live CD doesn’t recognise the touchpad and keyboard on my laptop at all What do I do now?

One way is drowning myself into Linux and making it work somehow. But I don’t trust my own abilities that heavily yet. I need to figure out a way of making the thing work, or my laptop is going to remain an expensive and oversize papaer weight.

I am currently trying some “hacks” for speeding up Vista. Recording everything I’m doing, and seeing how it works as well.

Hack no 1: Enhancing the performance of my SATA disk:

Do I have one? Er…. yes I’m a total newbie about some things.

I’m supposed to “expand disk drives” in my device manager according to this article. Ok, doing it…….. Ugh. Its so slow! I took some 3 minutes getting into the device manager…. and the SH** of it is that I get “not responding” no matter what I do for most stuff.

Back! I went to Device manager> Disk Drives> Right clicked my hard drive and checked enable advanced performance

There is a warning next ot it that it isn’t a good idea for computers without a back up power source, but since mine is a laptop, that’s not a problem. Unfortunately, the machine still isn’t as fast as I like and am used to getting with this configuration.

Let’s see what else I can do.

Hack No 2: Using my pen drive as an extended RAM with the ready boost feature

This seems fairly simple. I plugin my pen drive and wait for the auto play menu to ask me what to do. Then, I pick the option to speed up my system, and that allows it to use space in that drive for disk caching, and make the whole mess a little faster.

Doing it…….. Vista is still trying to read that empty drive and come up witht he box trying to ask me what to do. Done it, but oops. This device is not suitable. According to this article, the specs are at least 64MB USB2 device abole to read at 3.5MB and write at 2.5MB. Mine is a 1GB pendrive, so I guess it fails on the other requirements. I guess Microsucks wants me to buy a new pen drive too - as though the laptop wasn’t investment enough.

Hack No 3: Disabling network printer search

Unchecking Automatically search for network printers in Explorer>Tools>Folder Options>View tab

Strange - I don’t have this option at all - either checked or unchecked. I must have lost patience and disabled printers or something before doing this. So this is also not going to gain me speed.

Now what?

Hack No 4: Disabling the welcome center

I did click something or the other that makes it stop showing on start up, but this article wants me to go into the registry and do it. I guess to kill it from the root without even bothering for it to go around figuring out if it should load or not. I normally am leery about getting into the registry, but I guess I’m not going to miss the welcome center in any big way….

So fine. Start regegit>HKEY_CURRENT_USER, Software, Microsoft, Windows, CurrentVersion, Run> Delete WindowsWelcomeCenter Key. Ok, so this is the long route method. I already don’t have that key. Clicking the box that tells it not to load on start up seems to have done the same trick.

Hack No 5: Cleaning up the Start up applications

I’ve done it already

So far, so slow. Will hunt around for more options, or for my keyboard and touch pad drivers for the Ubuntu. Let’s see what happens first.