Haven been given two Dell Inspiron B130 LT's recently (one wouldn't boot, the other took 2 min) I've been experimenting with one. Reloaded WXP from scratch, stopped all unnecessary services to speed boot time, added another 500MB of Ram to bring it up to 1G.
Both HD's are Hitachi Travel(death)Stars, 80G, ultra100? interface. Thought perhaps a newer HD would be faster, but the specs on this are the same as the others.
In years past, I've used Defraggler. Been reading up on free space defrag, moving frequently used files to beginning of drive, etc. I've also used Auslogics Disk Defrag, which is quite fast. Read some very good things about PerfectDisk and another I think called SmartDisk. Also heard of one from Puran.
Any advice on this? How often should I do it? Are pay-for df's better than free ones? Seeking more detailed info on HD management.
Also, I noticed that this LT has a mini PCI buss for smartcards and wondered if I could plug in more memory here or some other device to improve performance. Is this buss speed faster than memory on a USB2 port? I've noticed some USB2 memory sticks are now 'stubs' or 'nibs': tiny little devices that maybe are just left in all the time to function as a SSD?
Thanks for responding
Both HD's are Hitachi Travel(death)Stars, 80G, ultra100? interface. Thought perhaps a newer HD would be faster, but the specs on this are the same as the others.
In years past, I've used Defraggler. Been reading up on free space defrag, moving frequently used files to beginning of drive, etc. I've also used Auslogics Disk Defrag, which is quite fast. Read some very good things about PerfectDisk and another I think called SmartDisk. Also heard of one from Puran.
Any advice on this? How often should I do it? Are pay-for df's better than free ones? Seeking more detailed info on HD management.
Also, I noticed that this LT has a mini PCI buss for smartcards and wondered if I could plug in more memory here or some other device to improve performance. Is this buss speed faster than memory on a USB2 port? I've noticed some USB2 memory sticks are now 'stubs' or 'nibs': tiny little devices that maybe are just left in all the time to function as a SSD?
Thanks for responding