Upon looking at the specs of what I had, I thought it might be reasonable to do some moderate upgrading while I was at it since I was going to spend some time working on it anyways and acquiring the unit itself had cost me nothing. I bore no illusions as far as its potential; this thing isn't gonna be running Crysis, nor would I need or want it to. With that in mind and a budget of about $100 I consulted Andro, who had experience getting all mod-fiddly with portable computers, as well as the infinite knowledge of the interwebs (the latter being remarkably less helpful).
To keep programs from caching to disk as much as possible, we decided running a healthy 4 GB of ram made sense, along with a 64 bit OS to make full use of it. That much RAM might seem like overkill but it gives me a nice big buffer against stacking multiple processes and/or processes that like to hang on to their allocated RAM and release it much more slowly than they snap it up. Newegg had a reasonable deal on 2x 2GB sticks by Corsair, so I grabbed the pair for around $80.
Though it would put me over my budget by a bit, I decided to be lazy and not deal with reformatting and repartitioning the existing HDD. I found a reasonable price on a 160GB 7200RPM drive by Western Digital and threw that in with my Newegg order. The drive was not only bigger, but faster and with a larger disk cache than the existing 120GB drive that was in the computer.
Installation of the hardware was a trivial matter, all of 10 minutes worth of using a screwdriver and pressing RAM into a slot. Once I had it all buttoned up and a fresh copy of Windows 7 installed it was like a completely different machine. Though I'm sure the absence of junk processes helped as well, the improved RAM and HDD situation really bring the laptop's performance up.
Careful not to squander the new performance, though, I went about cautiously figuring out which applications would fulfill my basic needs for the computer without being system hogs. Though Chrome gave Firefox a serious run for its money, I'm going to be sticking with my instance of FF for right now and possibly trying Chrome somewhere further down the road. For my media player, I decided to go with Zoom Player because of it's exceptional handling of .mkv files, which I find myself using more often than not. Zoom player is pretty cool in that you can actually choose to install and uninstall various codecs from a separate executable file, so you can save hard drive space by uninstalling things you don't think you will ever need. Though I have yet to migrate my music library over to this computer, I will be avoiding the system drain of iTunes and using MusikCube instead (read more about the MusikCube here)
A word on aesthetics: I was all set on getting Rainmeter installed and making a sweet futuristic/minimalistic theme for my computer, when I realized something very very important- the use of a touch pad makes your ability to intuitively navigate fancy ass shit almost nil. Thus, I decided it was prudent to stick to the standard Windows 7 buttons. I did decide to use Rainmeter, though, to make a little status bar that keeps track of my power, HDD space, CPU usage, and RAM usage in the corner of my screen. In this particular application, Rainmeter is extremely compact, not very graphically intensive, and exceptionally useful for telling what is going on at a glance. Though wallpapers and themes are a trivial item, I chose my color theme very carefully to be more muted and dark, as opposed to an assplosion of bright colors that strain the hell out of your eyes. Note that I've also hidden desktop icons, because I have an irrational hatred for their screen-clutter:
My only gripe with this computer so far is the battery life, all said and done it erodes about a percentage point every minute or so. Though I don't plan on going cordless for extended periods of time I would like to have the option, so I may be looking at bigger battery packs or something of the like.
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