Comments on: Upgrade diary: HP Pavilion a305w

By: Lazarus « Awed Manor

Lazarus « Awed Manor — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 03:38:57 +0000

[…] Bring in some new tools – Microsoft Security Essentials, CCleaner, MyDefrag, and for a browser, Google Chrome Canary edition. That last is an update of Google’s fast Chrome browser, that runs circles around other browsers when it comes to rendering web pages quickly. It doesn’t have a lot of extensions for it yet, or I can’t find them, so I updated the hosts file to block ads. I turn off the eye candy that Windows offers – all the drop shadows, font smoothing, and transitions/animations that don’t do anything useful except suck up CPU cycles. I changed the background from a picture to nothing – it’s blank gray now – so that wouldn’t use up memory. Once the disk defrag finishes, I’m going to apply the registry hacks that Dave Farquhar recommends here. […]

By: Dave Farquhar

Dave Farquhar — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 01:10:53 +0000

In reply to Glaurung_quena.

Agreed. Especially on the 80-plus. Thanks for pointing that out.

And if you’re looking around for a cheap PC to salvage a case and perhaps an optical drive from, independent thrift stores can be a good source. Most Goodwill and Salvation Army stores won’t take PCs, but the small indie shop near me does. Then they sell them cheap.

By: Dave Farquhar

Dave Farquhar — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 01:07:00 +0000

In reply to jim`. Jim, the registry hacks are to reduce disk access. If you're gonna live with a slow drive, might as well make life as easy on it as possible, right?

By: Glaurung_quena

Glaurung_quena — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 13:34:17 +0000

The main advantage of a garage sale or hand me down machine like this, as I see it, is that you get a free/cheap micro atx sized case of good (no sharp edges) quality, that otherwise you’d have to pay extra to get. M-atx cases are more expensive than their larger cousins, and sharp edges are ubiquitous in the cheaper cases in the low end of the price range. THen part it out, recycle the valueless stuff and sell what has any value on ebay, and build a new system in the case.

Also I second the idea of buying used parts one or two generations back – unless you’re a gamer with a huge monitor who likes to play the latest games, something one or two generations back (eg, a core 2 duo instead of an i3 or i7) is going to be perfectly adequate for all your needs, and is significantly cheaper than buying new.

You forgot to mention that when shopping for a new power supply, get an 80 plus certified one (which helps a bit in weeding out the crap), and if possible, get one that has had positive reviews on sites like Toms hardware, anandtech, or silentpcreview. If you go for the lowest available wattage model of one that’s been praised by one of those sites, you won’t pay too much of a premium, you’ll get something that’s more than adequate unless you’re going to load the machine down with drives and gamer video cards, and you won’t be buying a crap power supply.

By: jim`

jim` — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 22:21:01 +0000

You might want to take a look at the registry hacks you mentioned — I don’t see any difference between the two suggestions. What’s that supposed to accomplish, anyway? When I want to kill and rediscover hardware, I usually use the ENUM key.

PCI Video — you can’t kill the onboard? Oy vey! Gotta be a hack somewhere for that. If there isn’t, use the OLDEST Intel drivers you can find. Each iteration adds another layer of dreck. Do you really need hkcmd.exe and igfxtray.exe? I didn’t think so. Disable them from services.msc.

Dell disks work fine. How to install a lite version of Windows is a topic for another discussion. Needless to say, one can tweak Dell disks to circumvent their bloatware in addition to Microsoft’s.