Is your laptop cranky, sluggish, or out of sorts? It's probably not your imagination. Months of installing new programs, downloading email, and performing other workaday computing chores can weigh down your notebook with fragmented files, frivolous applications, and who knows what else. You can fiddle with your display and power-management settings, but they'll take you only so far. Don't overlook the basics -- such as keeping a clean and tidy hard drive and removing unnecessary background apps from your system. These optimisation tips apply specifically to users of Windows XP/98 users.

Hard drive housekeeping

	Open the Drive properties to check for errors and to defrag.

Keeping your hard drive clean and defragged (speeding its retrieval and saving by uniting the scattered bits of a data) is the easiest way to keep it humming.

1. Start your hard drive housekeeping by archiving or deleting files you don't need and backing up the rest.


2. To defrag what's left, go to My Computer or Windows Explorer (but not a shortcut to a drive).


3. Right-click a drive icon, select Properties, then click the Tools tab.


4. Click the Check Now button to have Windows check the drive for errors and fix them.


5. Go back to the Tools tab and click the Defragment Now button to defrag the drive.

Because defraggers are dreadfully slow, I strongly recommend that you use them only when you have a break in your day, or at day's end. You could also pick up something faster, such as Symantec's Norton Utilities 2004 (NU 2004). In my book, NU's Disk Doctor error-checking and Speed Disk defragging are the best in the business. On the other hand, I don't recommend NU's background application, System Doctor, for reasons that follow.

Removing background applications
By far the most conspicuous consumers of CPU cycles and wasters of Windows resources are background applications, often recognisable as icons in the Windows System tray. Perhaps you have a system monitor (such as NU's System Doctor), an Internet firewall, or a background virus checker. Other programs, like Microsoft Office and RealPlayer, load portions of themselves at Windows Startup. Some applications load pop-up reminders to, say, register your product. A notebook I reviewed recently "featured" a whopping 17 of these little devils, enough to slow its test scores significantly.

Exterminating these wee beasts is easy. First, of course, you should back up your system before making any changes to its configuration.

	Open System Configuration Utility to view edit startup files.

1a. In Windows XP, Microsoft has included a program called System Configuration Utility that lets you safely edit all your startup files, including your autoexec.bat, config.sys, and win.ini files. It also provides access to programs that load when Windows boots. From Windows Start menu, click Run (or press Windows + R) and type 'msconfig' to open System Configuration Utility. In the utility, select the Startup tab; there you'll see a list of the programs and their filenames. Simply uncheck any programs you don't want to load. Don't worry -- you can always go back and reselect them later.

1b. In Windows 98, from Windows' Start menu, click Programs • Accessories • System Tools and launch System Information. In System Information, select Tools • System Configuration Utility. In the utility, select the Startup tab; there you'll see a list of the programs and their filenames which you can uncheck if you don't want them to load.

2. Which programs should you remove? Good question -- and the one that most intimidates users who don't know what these background programs are or what they do. Check your system documentation, or call your computer vendor or the software company itself, to find out what the program does and whether it's vital to your system's operation. A good way would be to check Google for more information on the Startup Item such as Winampa or Mixer.

Proper hard drive maintenance and the removal of unnecessary background apps are not the only ways you can optimise your notebook's performance -- but they have a tremendous impact. Taking the proper precautions is the most important part of the process.

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