Source: apcmag.com

So you know someone who's bought one of the new Eee PCs running Windows XP? Take pity on them and make a few of these changes to make it run better.

After all the poking and prodding which went into our review of the XP-equipped Eee PC, we couldn't resist trying a few simple optimisations. Why? Well, just because, okay? We're geeks: we don't need an excuse!

The first thing we did (after connecting a USB mouse, because the too-tiny trackpad drives us crazy) was to pull the UI back from the screen-chewing default XP theme to the leaner and cleaner 'Windows Classic' mode. It's less wasteful of the very limited screen real estate, especially when you set the Start menu to the matching 'Classic Start menu' single column, choose the 'small icons' option and prune the menu items a bit as well. It also uses slightly less resources and thus makes things a tad zippier.

Above: Tight fit -- XP's default UI was designed for much larger screens than the Eee PC's tiny 7 inch panel...

Above: Much better -- scaling everything back to the 'Classic' UI mode makes much more sense, both in screen space and using slightly less system resources

Then we deep-sixed eye candy such as the transition effects for menus and toolbars and showing the contents of a window while it was being dragged. And we ditched the wallpaper (yes, we're a little boring that way).

Next to go was System Restore. Deactivating this not only removes one background process that's always watching for changes to system files, but it reclaims the disk space where those backup files would be stored. System Restore was set to a maximum of 456MB..

While on that space-saving kick we dove headfirst into the Recycle Bin, which by default ropes off 10% of each fixed drive in your PC. In the case of the Eee PC's 3.71GB SSD that was 380MB. We pulled it down to a more reasonable 2%, or 76MB. So with just those two easy steps we'd gained 760MB, which is equivalent to four episodes of Jon Stewart's The Daily Show (one of the standard units of measuring disk capacity).

Continue reading...