Rebuilding My Laptop

[tinjaw]

I put MS Windows Vista on my laptop and kept it on there for about a day. Nothing to see here. Move along.

I have decided to rebuilt the laptop after wiping it clean and installing MS Windows XP Home SP2. However, I am going to try and heavily tune it for software development. PYTHON ROCKS! By that I mean that I intend to turn off every service that isn't needed while developing software. Uninstalling all the software that is extraneous and just taking up hard drive space. Removing all non-essential programs from the startup group and the matching registry locations, etc.

I am then going to install my "favorite" "best of breed" applications and image the drive.

I am going to try to keep a decent journal of what I install and maybe write up a short blog post on what I install.

What I want to know from my fellow DCers, is what online resources have you personally used (not just ones that you are aware of) when determining what services can be safely disabled, what programs can safely be shutdown, and what extraneous chunks of Windows itself can be uninstalled?

[nudone]

if it's an older laptop you might like to try putting on win2k instead of xp (as me and f0dder were contemplating with newer machines). it would probably have to be quite a old one - i've got win2k on a pentium 2 laptop as it was unusable with xp installed on it.

BUT as you have already had vista on the machine i guess it must be pretty up to date so i'm not really giving you good advice.

[f0dder]

www.nliteos.com + http://www.ryanvm.ne...msfn/updatepack.html - I use that for XP, should work for 2k as well. As for which services are safe to disable... test with vmware 

[tinjaw]

It is a modern laptop. The only reason I am doing this is because it only has 512MB of RAM and I am not in a position to buy more, even though it is relatively inexpensive. So I am getting it down to minimal memory usage for I am not page swapping while doing development.

[f0dder]

I used to do XP on an athlon700/512meg, was quite okay... so you don't need all that fancy stuff, althuogh it helps

[Darwin]

Win2k will sing on 512MB RAM. I just gave my dad my old P-IIIE 600mhz notebook with 512MB RAM and Win2k. It blows away my WinXP Pro Centrino notebook (1.4Ghz) with a gig of RAM in a lot of ways. PaintShopPro loads more quickly, it boots faster, etc. I upgraded that notebook from 64 to 128 to 512 MB RAM but the biggest performance boost came AFTER I upgraded the RAM to 512 - I installed a 20GB harddrive and put Win2k on it instead of Win98SE. The difference was profound. That 7 year old Compaq is still going strong, albeit with an 80GB harddrive...

[Darwin]

Sorry Tinjaw. Just noted your comment above about not being in a position to buy more RAM to solve your problem. Obviously, unless you have a copy of Win2k my comments above are not really useful  .

[tinjaw]

I've got copies of Windows from 95 upward. I need WinXP on there because I need to develop my software to work on WinXP.

Darwin,

I think I need to steal your avatar and put a tin jaw on him. :-)

[Darwin]

upgraded that notebook from 64 to 128 to 512 MB RAM but the biggest performance boost came AFTER I upgraded the RAM to 512 - I installed a 20GB harddrive and put Win2k on it instead of Win98SE. The difference was profound.

Cripes! This is gibberish and it's too late to edit the original as the thread has moved ahead -who will read the edit 

I meant to say, and hope it was implied anyway, that I had Win98SE running with 128MB of RAM and didn't notice much of a difference when I upgraded to 512MB RAM. When I upgraded Win98SE to Win2k, it was like I had put my notebook on nitrous...

tinjaw - the avatar is Amud 1 from Israel. A Neanderthal male. Might look good with a tin jaw! Too bad Win2k won't work for you. I'm dithering about installing it on my next notebook as the only XP discs I have are OEM and no doubt the next notebook will be Vista. I'd like to be able to dual boot it, just in case...