Give Your Netbook an Extra Boost

Do you watch movies or play online games on your netbook? I bet you don’t. Unless you’re content with circa 1980 games like Pacman or Donkey Kong, you can’t expect anything exciting from your diminutive machine.

The netbook’s limitation is largely due to its size. The hard drive alone already occupies about 30% of the device. The rest is taken up by the motherboard to which the processor and the graphics engine are already embedded. There’s clearly no space left for any peripheral which could help the main chip to pump more blood into the system.

Soldered Organs

A solution that many would want to consider is to replace the innards of their netbook. This would seem logical. Indeed, if you can’t add new parts into your machine, then just replace the existing ones. This is easy when you’re replacing peripherals in desktops. However, doing the same in netbooks is something that even brain surgeons would probably shy away from.

The main components of the mini PC are soldered in the motherboard, such as the processor. This means that you cannot replace the chip without cutting it off from the board. Obviously, any upgrade involving the processor alone is impossible. If you really want to replace the engine, you would have to throw out the whole chassis along with it. This would already be impractical considering the costs. You’re probably better off buying a new netbook altogether.

Brain Power

This doesn’t mean, though, that you can’t enlarge the biceps of your machine. One upgrade that you could definitely do is increase the RAM size of your mini PC. This would definitely take away a few pounds of burden from your processor and hard drive as applications can be loaded and ran in the memory.

While adding a few gigabytes of RAM into your machine may be simple, the consequent licensing issues may somewhat be complicated. As you may have noticed, most netbooks run on Windows XP. This OEM version has a limitation – it cannot be installed on PCs that have more than 1GB of RAM in it. You would therefore virtually forfeit your OS, or the legal use thereof, if you decide to inject more memory into your computer.

The policy does seem to be absurd, but analysts think that Microsoft introduced this restriction so that users would be forced to use Vista instead of XP in more powerful machines. Unless you’re willing to use an OS with a defective license, you should consider other methods of upgrade. Better yet, just consider using a different operating system which does not have RAM restrictions.

Trim Down Features

If you can’t add a few pounds to your netbook, then try putting the programs that it’s carrying on a diet. There might be some features in Windows XP that you can live without. Disabling them would mean freeing more resources for more important tasks.

One resource hog that you don’t probably need or even want is XP’s visual effects. To disable this, go to Control Panel and double click on System. Select the Advance tab then click on the Settings button in the Performance section. Revise the settings to Adjust for Best Performance.

Injecting steroids into your netbook may be difficult. However, a few simple tweaks in your OS or system’s settings may already give your netbook that extra boost it needs to perform tasks snappily.