Comp gurus: Learn me on speeding up my laptop

[ViPER1313]

I really don't think it's worth reformatting. Once you install all the SP3 updates again it will be as slow as it is now.

You saw all that bullshit he had on there, right? No chance it would be as slow as it is now.

I reformatted a 4 y/o machine at work and even after all the Windows updates it was 5x faster (I benchmarked)... and that's a machine that doesn't have all the bullshit people put of their personal machines.

Really, the amount of programs he was running was minimal:

McAfee, AdAware, Java Runtime, ITunes, Printer Drivers, and a few other tray icons and speed loaders to launch other programs more quickly. Worst case I would say 500mb of ram usage.

I run more programs at launch on all my machines with less ram, they are not slow. If you do some maintenance every once in a while and tweak XP so it doesn't frag your drive constantly (disable file backup, disable file indexing, set the swap file to a fixed size) then you should never experience a slowdown.