How to Speed Up Your Netbook

December 21, 2009 By Dena Cassella

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We show you the steps and tips you need to speed up your netbook.

You bought your netbook for portability, convenience and mobility– you didn’t buy it so you could stash a bunch of games, files, programs and pictures on it. Netbooks are small PCs that need to be refreshed every now and then since their tiny frames can only hold so much info. Basically the best way to speed up your netbook is to get rid of anything and everything you don’t use or don’t need. If your system runs Windows XP, which most netbooks do, here’s the easiest way to get some extra speed out of you petite PC. These 6 steps and the following few suggestions will take the glam out of your netbook, but it will leave you with speedy results:

Steps to Adjust Performance Settings

1. Open the Control Panel.

2. Double-click System.

3. Click the Advanced tab

4.Click the Settings button in the Performance section.

5. The Visual Effects tab is usually set to “Let Windows choose what’s best for my computer,” change it to “Adjust for best performance”

6. Click OK, and after Windows readjusts itself then click OK again to exit System Properties.

Other Options and Considerations…

Don’t Upgrade. Don’t upgrade your netbook operating system—in fact, sometimes it’s better to downgrade the OS, which is why so many netbooks run on Windows XP and also why Windows 7 netbooks still have a bunch of kinks that need worked out of them. Netbooks shouldn’t have or need that much power.

Graphics Slowing You Down? Use a GMA Booster. A GMA Booster is free, but it must be reinstalled every 10 days unless a donation is made to the creator, is a great way to boost performance. This can really speed up a netbook.

Remove Unused Software. If you don’t need it or use it, get it off your netbook. Try for a fresh install with only the necessary services running.

Juice Up Settings. Use your battery to feed the settings on your netbook to make it run quicker—unfortunately this will drain your battery quicker as well, so you have to make a choice. Click on the battery in the task bar, or go to Start -> Control Panel -> Power Management and shift your settings.

Showing 13 comments

JB whisky at 10:58am 19th December 2010 use ubuntu and solve your problems
Kaysweb at 1:49pm 25th August 2010 I love the size of the Netbook for traveling and am willing to invest a little money to make it faster. I just put a SSD drive in my Macbook and it almost doubled the speed. I'm thinking of doing the same to my Netbook. I have discovered that each type of computer has it's own purpose and the Netbook works perfectly for what I purchased it for.
Shaggy Nutz at 9:51am 15th August 2010 I'll take XP over W7 on ANY of my machines anyday. XP is tried and true, there's no real reason to upgrade to something still in its early stages. And Netbooks do what they're supposed to do: go on the internet and perform basic utilities. I have no complaints about my Asus netbook. I bought it for school, so all I expected out of it was to write up essays/take notes, etc. and play my music movies off an external hdd... but with a little tweaking I had it running Half Life 1, CS 1.6, and Starcraft (dont need to make any adjustments for this). Not bad for 170.
1. dizbuster at 3:00pm 28th August 2010 Give W7 a chance. Its far better than XP anyday. Xp is outdated and slow compared to W7. The good thing about W7 is its so far advanced than XP. Ditch XP its on its last legs.
  1. casualobserver at 9:27pm 28th December 2010 How is it far better? Is it going to last 10 years? How do you know? What can it do that XP cannot? Can it find your files like XP can? No. Can you repair install it when it breaks? No. How many clicks does it take to get to it's tootsy roll center? Many more clicks. People who prefer Windows 7 are the people who never found those settings in XP to begin with, won't find them in Windows 7, and therefore can't measure the difference.
Manik at 2:35pm 13th June 2010 And your Iphone also multitasks like your netbook I believe :D :D
jescott418 at 4:26pm 6th May 2010 I don't see that I referenced anything religious? I simply pointed out opinions and personal experiences.
Maybe you could do the same?
John S is a moron at 10:47am 10th April 2010 You are truly an idiot. Stop drivveling and acting holier-than-thou.
John S at 2:57am 12th February 2010 The typical Netbook is slow. It has a single core hyper threaded piece of crap from days gone by. It has a archaic graphics chip and a decade old Windows XP operating system. You might as well have a 5 year old IBM Thinkpad off lease because it will probably run better! I use my Lenovo S10e sparely and run Windows 7 premium on it. Its more secure then XP and you can disable some of the eye candy to keep it snappy. Windows Starter 7 that comes with many Netbooks is junk. It was put out there to satisfy the manufacture on price. Don't let anyone tell you that XP is the way to go. XP should have been dead a long time ago and the netbooks just screwed that up! In fact unless you need a small and tiny computer your better off buying a cheap 15 inch laptop.
1. casualobserver at 9:11pm 28th December 2010 I also agree that you are an idiot John. The way you describe a single core hyper threaded processor as a piece of crap truly makes you sound like a child. Yes, the netbook is watered-down, but an overclocked P4 will run circles around lots of the new stuff especially running apps not yet optimized for multiple cores, and there is a lot still out there that people actually use. Windows XP is old, but hands down is the best overall OS released from Microsoft to date. I hope we can say that about Windows 7 after 10 years, but when you absolutely positively need it to work and there's a gun to your head--well, I'll take XP. Of course, I know how to browse so I don't need all that extra "security". The first thing that you clowns can come up with is "upgrade it to Windows 7 premium". Well considering you have to turn everything off to make it faster, it makes little sense to upgrade. I am willing to bet XP would actually make a netbook faster considering how fast Windows 2000 ran on computers designed for XP. It's got considerably less work to do!
Shaun at 12:54am 1st January 2010 rofl iphone kills it, as if an iphone has better web browsing, considering it does not support flash i fail to see how it can kill it
Max at 6:48pm 26th December 2009 Don't expect anything great from them. Besides looking kinda nifty, my Dell Mini has been a cash sink. I upgraded it's RAM to 2GB in hopes of improving it's performance. The results have been sub-stellar. Even after mutliple tweaks, removing unneeded software, etc.

The bottom line is it's serves as basically a marginal web browsing machine for $500. My iPhone kills it!
anxietyremedies at 10:17am 23rd December 2009 Removing unused softwares will be more helpful in improving the speed of your notebook.I don't know about GMA Booster but I do agree with you as graphics is one of the main reason to slowing down the speed.