15 Simple Steps to Make Your Laptop Faster and Safer

June 22, 2009 at 06:06:32 AM, by Gilberto J. Perera

Gilberto J. Perera is back with more valuable info on how to improve your laptop's performance, while prolonging its life and keeping it safe from malware and other crap you never asked for.

This guide is a result of owning a laptop for many years. I highlight some of the things that I’ve learned the hard way and others I’ve picked up along the way. You will notice that there is emphasis on the use of offline capabilities and the synchronization of ‘stuff’. This is mostly due to the fact that I use a desktop at home and a laptop when offsite. When I set out to write this guide I decided to address three themes;

Making the most out of your laptop’s performance
Ensuring that your laptop and the information stored is safe from malware and prying eyes
Lastly ensuring that using your laptop remained practical

You will notice that some of these items will be applicable to a desktop as well. I hope you find this article as useful as you do practical.

Make Your Laptop Faster

1. Dust off!

In order for your laptop to perform at its best we need to make sure that it can breathe. If your laptops intake and exhaust vents are clogged up with dust, hair, and who knows what, air circulation is restricted and your laptop will run hotter than it should. This will decrease performance and the usable life of internal components.

Unlike a desktop that can be opened up with very little effort, a laptop requires the removal of quite a few teeny, tiny screws that could get lost if you’re not careful. For the sake of simplicity and to keep you from voiding your warranty, cleaning will be confined to the intake and exhaust vents usually located near the CPU heat sink accessible from the exterior.

I would recommend that your use an air spray bottle and that you follow the simple guidelines below when using it.

When using compressed air, make sure to use anti-static compressed air.
Be careful not to tilt the can while spraying because the liquid can damage components.
Use cotton swabs to hold the fan blade to prevent the fan from spinning. Spinning too fast can damage the motor.
Make sure the laptop is turned off and unplugged. The battery should be removed.

2. Optimize, privatize, and clean your computer

When used correctly CCleaner will, “…declutter your computer by cleaning up your registry and removing old and unused files and programs.” I think that covers it. CCleaner also helps maintain your privacy; it offers options to clean browsing history, temp files, and other files that could compromise your privacy. It is a versatile and useful program, best of all it’s free! Download

3. Control Your Startups

A lot of programs can make it to your startup list, unfortunately most of the time you don’t realize it until your computer is too slow. Luckily there are ways to configure which programs start up and which ones don’t.

Option 1 - Use Winternals (Microsoft’s) Autoruns - This program “…shows you the currently configured auto-start applications as well as the full list of Registry and file system locations available for auto-start configuration. Autostart locations displayed by Autoruns include logon entries, Explorer add-ons, Internet Explorer add-ons including Browser Helper Objects (BHOs), Appinit DLLs, image hijacks, boot execute images, Winlogon notification DLLs, Windows Services and Winsock Layered Service Providers. Switch tabs to view autostarts from different categories.” So pretty much you’ll know what’s going on and can tell your computer exactly which programs, services, and add-ons you want to have the computer start with.

Download Autoruns

Option 2 - Use Windows Defender – Instead of using Msconfig tool (a lot of folks do) which Microsoft states is not intended to control startup programs, it is intended to“…help you find problems with your Windows XP configuration. It does not manage the programs that run when Windows starts.” Windows Defender offers users an interface to control which programs to auto-start. With Windows Defender open, click on Tools > Software Explorer.

4. Make sure the bookshelves are in alphabetical order.

I like to use the analogy of a bookshelf when describing what fragmentation is. If files are fragmented they are out of order and spread all over the disc. Defragmentation places them together and in an order which makes file access quicker. So if you want your laptop’s hard drive to respond quickly make sure that you defragment your hard drive often.

You can defragment your hard drive using Windows built in defragmentation tools (which is pretty much a Diskeeper “lite”) or you can download DirMS a free application that goes beyond Microsoft’s defragmentation capabilities. If you have fifty bucks to spare you can pick up O&O’s Defrag 11 which offers a monitoring solution that keeps your hard drive performing at is best.

5. Enable hibernate and suspend modes

Although it does not improve the speed of your laptop (actually it can slow it down if you don’t restart it once in a while), enabling hibernate and suspend modes can get you into your laptop quickly when the need arises. If your laptop takes 45 seconds to a minute just to boot up you might want to cut that down to a fraction of the time by leaving your laptop in hibernation.

6. Upgrade to the N

If you’re streaming videos from a home server or watching Netflix videos via your laptop’s wireless connection then that connection might be better served with an N wireless device. Although still in draft, the N specification for wireless devices offers some great advantages over a/b/g. Among those is the broader range and increased throughput (4X) compared to previous specifications.

7. Upgrade your hard drive with a Solid State Drive

With the increased popularity of Solid-State-Drives, prices have come down and options have broadened. A study performed by hothardware.com reveals that the SSD drives outperformed standard hard drives in measures of startup time and Windows 7 Experience Ratings. There are other studies that go into more detail regarding the speed improvements of these drives. All studies agree that they are much faster than traditional hard drives. So which one would you want in your laptop?

Make Your Laptop Safer

8. Use AVG Antivirus with Firefox Add-on

Having an easy to use, trustworthy, and light (not a resource hog) antivirus program is very important. AVG offers its most popular antivirus solution to home users for free. The program is light, has a resident shield that scans everything that is running on your computer, and it even includes an add-on for browsers that cross references websites to make sure that they are safe (see screen shot above). Download AVG

9. Encrypt your drive with BitLocker

Drive encryption will ensure that your most treasured documents stored on your laptop remain safe. You can use BitLocker if you have Vista Ultimate or Enterprise Editions, if you have none you can try TrueCrypt an open source encryption platform that will run on Windows, Linux, and Mac.

10. Stay up to date - Easier said than done

It is definitely easier said than done. Updates only begin with the operating system and antivirus applications. You also have to consider all of the other applications installed on your computer, particularly those with access to the internet. You need to make sure that your Office (Word, Excel, Outlook), Adobe Reader, firewalls, browsers, all applications are up to date. You not only gain from having secure software but you may also take advantage of fixes that improve software performance and reliability.

Make sure that Windows Update checks not only for OS updates but also for Office updates. When prompted by Firefox or Adobe to update your software, do so right away. They usually have updates because they’ve discovered security holes that need to be patched up. Some of the larger malware infections that have occurred in the past have been due to lack of updates to patch vulnerabilities.

11. Use Trend Micro’s HijackThis

Along with AVG Antivirus and Windows Defender I urge you to use HijackThis. It is a free application from Trend Micro that uses a different approach to detect malware residing on your computer. It requires a little more understanding than an antivirus program does due to the number of false positive that you may encounter. I would definitely install it and become acquainted with forums and websites that discuss the malware detected by this application so that you can make better decisions.

Additional No-Nonsense Efficiency Tips

12. Conserve Power

Today, laptops come with so many features; Bluetooth, optical drives, speakers, wireless adapters, multiple hard drives, lights, backlit keyboards, to name a few. All these built-in peripherals consume electricity which translates to battery capacity. I hardly ever use the optical drive on my laptop, so I’ve told my Lenovo power management software to turn it off. Most of the time that I use a laptop I’m in a class or in a meeting, at which time I don’t require audio so I also tell power management to shut that off as well. A lot of times I leave my Bluetooth mouse at home and end up using the track pad all the while the Bluetooth radio is still running for no reason. I end up disabling that as well.

The point I’m trying to make here is that when we are using battery power, we tend to consume power for things we don’t use. Next time you boot up your computer open power management and make the necessary adjustments to extend the life of your battery while you’re off the grid.

13. Use Sync Center to Keep Offline Files Online

Having a laptop and a desktop can be quite a headache. Files on one computer are not on the other, copying files from one computer to another can be fatal, and the overall frustration of keeping two sets of files can be inconvenient. If you have a home server, a NAS device on your network, or a designated sharing location on your computers I urge you to use Sync Center on your laptop. I’ve been using it for the past 2 months and I regret that I did not know of Sync Center’s capabilities earlier.

When enabled your laptop will keep an offline copy of the files you select so that you can work away from home or the office. It will sync those changes with the designated directory and keep all designated files up to date.

14. Use Your Laptops PCI Express Slot for Additional Storage

Most of the time when you buy a laptop they already have wireless, Bluetooth, and even cell phone network cards all built-in. So the unused PCI Express slots sit there empty. Why not use those slots to add an SSD drive or a card reader with an SD card that can act as a secondary hard drive? Wouldn’t it be nice if all your music, videos, and large files resided in one of these cards and not on your hard drive? You can probably pick up 32GB Secure Digital card for about $100 + $20-$30 for a reader. You can also find a 64GB Solid State Drive ExpressCard for about the same price.

Using your Express slot for additional storage will keep you from having to upgrade your current hard drive and improve performance by keeping all that music of your main hard drive.

15. Use Gears and Stay Online

Enabling gears with Google products will keep your information readily available even if you're not online. Google Gears is essentially a browser extension that allows certain web applications (Gmail, Docs, Calendar) to be accesible offline. It also allows synchronization of changes made offline.

When I discovered Google Gears and its ability to offer me Exchange like capabilities with Gmail and Calendar, I dropped Outllook in a heartbeat. I am able to work with email on both my laptop and desktop without having to pay for exchange or ever worry about synchronizing PST files.

I hope that the list above is as useful as it has been to me. Please post any comments or suggestions below.

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