I’m in the market for performance enhancers. Not the kind that get Olympic champions disqualified. The kind that will squeeze 10-20% faster speed out my laptop. Since I spend 8-10 hours a day with this thing (currently a Lenovo T61p) and consistently run a dozen applications, browsers, VM ware instances, test servers and install alpha, and beta applications that are not always the most optimized – I spend a noticeable amount of time … waiting around. As any good cook will tell you – keep your knives sharp.
If I can get my computer to run faster, and save 10 mins per hour (1 hours per day or 30 per month) that’s worth big bucks to me. So when I saw an advertisement offering 4gb of ram for only $50, I had to check it out. Of course the ad did not mention that the 4gb consists of two 2GB dims…which I already have. I thought I was going to get 8GB of ram…
Here is my current long term plan:
- 8GB of RAM. Still too expensive to invest in. I could buy an additional cheap laptop instead. When prices fall (maybe by the fall) I’ll pick some up. Research leads me to think I can achieve this in a T61p but I’m going to have to change OS to do it. I currently run Vista Ultimate and that wont cut it. So I have to install a different OS…
- Widows 7 (maybe). I’m still unsure if the better OS might be Vista 64, XP 64, or maybe Widows Server 2003 or even some Linux version and run other stuff in VM. That’s a lot of options so I could use the advice of anyone with experience.
- 128GB (or bigger) SSD (solid state drive – basically a hard drive with no moving parts that is supposed to be really, really fast). There are a lot of manufactures making these and I have a feeling prices are going to tumble. But which one? The fastest SSD? The cheapest SSD?
- What about Turbo Cache?
- What about the PCMI Expresscard slot. Can’t you put a SSD of some other performance booster in there?
- What about settings?
- What about BIOS versions?
- What about other software to manage all this tech better?
As you can see, my dream still requires more research, since I don’t even know what I want yet. But I will update this post with my findings as they develop. What have you done to improve the performance of your laptop? Got any advice?