BleepingComputer.com: Tweaking The Hp Pavilion A1250n

My sister just bought a HP Pavilion a1250n w/ the AMD Athlon X2 3800+ and Vista. I finally got around to doing some basic tweaks to it and could not believe how much junk was loaded on it. When I was done I had removed 35 + gigs of useless programs and files. I also shut down all of the unnecessary start up programs and disabled the unused windows services. When I first started working on it, it was booting a lot slower than even my PC w/ a Pentium 4 1.6 gig w/ 768 megs of ram, but after trimming the fat it runs like a top.

Are there any more tweaks that I may have missed that would be worthwhile for a very basic user?

The three most effective tweaks that I recommend are:
1) Setting the display to the lowest possible settings (particularly the amount of color displayed)
2) Go to Start and type in "sysdm.cpl" (without the quotes) and press Enter. Click on the Advanced tab, then on the Performance Settings button, then on the Visual Effects tab select Adjust for Best Performance.
3) My own personal favorite - disable the Aero theme

You can check out this topic, for some basics:
Slow Computer?, Use this troubleshooting checklist

I didn't know they were still selling computers with ddr1?

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/documen...228&lang=en

At least they put a gig of ram in it before they sold it with vista on it, might think about getting her to add another gig if she will ever use it for video or graphics work.

http://www.crucial.com/store/mpartspecs.as...D8B045CA5CA7304


if her installed memory is cas 3 then this would be the best option
http://www.crucial.com/store/mpartspecs.as...D8B045CA5CA7304

too bad this ram hasn't dropped in price like the newer ddr2

DaChew, on Sep 28 2007, 05:57 AM, said:

The memory that I installed on my PC was from her old computer that she replaced w/ the a1250n, sorry about the mix up. I will get her to upgrade her new PC but do you think the 2x512 option would be better then a single 1g stick?

You'll see no difference (IMO) between 2-512 mB sticks and 1-1 gB stick when using DDR (aka DDR1)

Using DDR2, you may see a difference - if you have Dual Channel enabled in the BIOS. In that case, matching modules will work faster than a single module. If Dual Channel is disabled - then you won't see a difference.

dual channel performance will always be better than single, how much depends upon whether memory performance
is a bottleneck on not in that particular application

often a matched pair is cheaper than a single stick, depends upon the size and availability

don't add a single stick to a system that's already running dual channel matched pairs, you might end up slowing down the existing installed memory


everest home free shows the specs on the installed memory and settings that it's running at

http://majorgeeks.com/download4181.html