Modernising xp?

Cyrus

Lads

im just after picking up a cracking little copaq 311c netbook, it comes pre installed with xp home sp3 and im not inclined to fork out for 7 as xp will do what i need it to adequately.

so what im wondering is, apart from uninstalling all the bloatware and tidying up the program start ups etc, are there any tweaks that one should do to ensure xp moves along as quickly as it can,

also can anyone recommend a decent theme or skin for xp that modernises it a little, dont want a resource hog or anything that doesnt work completely

thanks in advance

Fysh

If you want XP to move along at a reasonable clip, the first thing you should be doing is forgetting about themes and switching to the Windows Classic theme, as it uses the least resources for pointless window-dressing guff. Bear in mind, it's a 9-year-old OS at this point - there are ways to make it behave like Vista (and probably like 7 too) but aside from the seriously dodgy hackery involved in doing so, none of those things will be particularly geared towards netbook-level hardware.

After that, I'd suggest using services.msc to go through all the services that are enabled by default and disabling those you don't need (eg IMAPI CD Burning, Print Spooler, Cardspace, etc).

Msconfig will let you have reasonable control over what runs at startup, too.

Cyrus

Fysh wrote: »

If you want XP to move along at a reasonable clip, the first thing you should be doing is forgetting about themes and switching to the Windows Classic theme, as it uses the least resources for pointless window-dressing guff. Bear in mind, it's a 9-year-old OS at this point - there are ways to make it behave like Vista (and probably like 7 too) but aside from the seriously dodgy hackery involved in doing so, none of those things will be particularly geared towards netbook-level hardware.

After that, I'd suggest using services.msc to go through all the services that are enabled by default and disabling those you don't need (eg IMAPI CD Burning, Print Spooler, Cardspace, etc).

Msconfig will let you have reasonable control over what runs at startup, too.

thanks, the 311c is relatively snappy for a netbook and utilises the ion chipset so a little window dressing, pardon the pun, wont slow it too much!

Viper_JB

What also might be worth doing, if you goto control panel, add/remove programs and goto the windows compontents tab on the left side of the window - there's always a few items that you'll never use which are installed so fell free to get rid of some rubbish in there. If you get REALLY bored you could also look into replacing your default windows shell to something that isn't based on explorer.exe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_shell_replacement requires a bit of research though, but there are plenty of benefits, I used to use aston shell, was very cool looking and less of a resource hog, takes time though.