If you find yourself whinging about your slow netbook as I did in a previous post, here’s a couple of things that have helped get mine running quite a bit quicker (though still not quick enough!).
1. Get rid of any desktop search tools. I find Windows desktop search invaluable at work, where I have 10+ Gb of emails and other documents stored on the PC, so I installed it on my netbook. Big mistake. It seriously slows the thing down with its background indexing, and anyway it’s totally useless as I don’t store files on my netbook so have no need to search it.
2. Don’t use a system-hogging antivirus. A bit of detective work with Windows Task Manager showed that the antivirus software that I have to run to access work’s VPN was hogging 50% of the CPU a lot of the time, just doing nothing.
3. Stick to one browser – Chrome. This one’s harder said than done because no one browser has it all but it’s worth a try.
