Ten Ways to Optimize Your Netbook [How To]

Article by Raj Chowdary Posted: July 26, 2011

A netbook can be a very good option for you, if all you do is send emails, browse the Web, chat online, and do some basic MS Office tasks. It is quite efficient for such simple tasks and comes with an added advantage of portability.

I list below ten ways to optimize your netbook. They are as follows,

1. A netbook is typically meant to be used on the go. It would be advisable to buy another battery. This may make the netbook bulky, but it will serve the purpose of using on the go. Additional battery helps the netbook last longer.

2. You can upgrade the RAM on your netbook to say, 4GB. This considerably improves the speed of your netbook.

3. If your netbook came pre-loaded with Windows Vista or Windows 7, you should downgrade it to Windows XP. Vista and Windows 7 are resource hungry and slows down your netbook. Downgrading to XP improves the speed of your netbook. XP is not as resource consuming as Vista or Windows 7.

4. Remove all the unnecessary pre-installed software provided by your laptop manufacturer. Chances are that you wouldn’t be using most of them. So, it is advisable to remove them from your netbook. Higher the number of installed software on your netbook, the slower your netbook becomes.

5. Remove all the unnecessary startup programs. There may be many startup programs right now on your netbook. You don’t need all of them during startup. Such programs can be removed and started only when necessary. Removing such programs speeds up your netbook.

6. You need to disable services that are not necessary. This can done by selecting “run” on the start menu and typing in services.msc and hitting enter. Care should taken that you don’t disable any services necessary for Windows.

7. You can improve the speed of your netbook by optimizing the appearance. You can switch to the Classic View or personalize your settings by right clicking on the desktop and choosing your preferred settings. This works for Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7.

8. You need to defragment your hard drive regularly, typically atleast once a week. This helps you access information on your hard drive quickly.

9. Using light software instead of heavy ones, speeds up your netbook considerably. You can try using Google Chrome for browsing the internet. Chrome is a very light browser and consumes very less resources compared to other browsers. Similarly find out other light-weight software instead of the software you use regularly.

10. Try to use the full screen option as much as possible. Since, the viewing area on a netbook is very less, you should always use the full screen option to get the most viewing area possible. If you are using Chrome for browsing, you can press the F11 key to make it full screen.

Tagged as: Chrome, Windows 7