"Itinerantscholar" wrote in
message ...
I bought a Dell Inspiron 1501 with Vista on it. It has the typical
performance problems that have been noted for laptops running Vista. It
receives a "Windows Experience Index" of 2.0.

The first thing you are told to do to improve performance is eliminate
programs from startup. But when I go through the long list of programs, I
often can't tell what they do. For instance, I see in this list
"Avantquest
Digital Line Detection," "Dell Quick Set," "Synaptics Pointing Device,"
and
"Java (TM) Platform SE 6U5," among many others. Do I just start
experimenting and see what happens when I turn them off? That seems very
risky. After all, that "pointing device"--that's my touchpad, isn't it?
If
I turned off my touchpad, I think my computer would be useless to me,
because
I do not know how to turn the touchpad on again without the touchpad.

In short: is there a way to know which programs would be the best ones to
turn off? In case it is not already obvious, I do not know a lot about
computers. My experience with Vista has been frustrating, because I feel
like I do not have the specialized technical training required to make my
laptop work well.


Which of the five elements gets you a base score of '2'?

Bear in mind that laptops have to balance between sheer power and battery
life. You could change the power settings, but ensure that you are connected
to the mains power.

How much memory do you have installed? You need more than 1gb RAM because
the video card will take maybe 256mb, leaving you with less than optimum for
everything else..


--
Mike Hall - MVP
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