Solved! SLOW DELL LATITUDE E6500

[morabors]

I bought a Dell E6500 for my daughter for college. It runs very slow. I was attributing it to the fact it is a 32 bit Vista but now want to make sure all hardware is good. It has a Intel duo P8600 @2.4 GHz with 4Gig of ram DDR2 400 MHz. CPUZ shows a core speed of 1064MHz, is this correct? If so how can I speed this thing up? Would it help if I installed Win7 as I have heard Vista sucks and I have Win7 on my desktops and am very happy with it. Thanks.

 

[txsouthpaw]

CPUZ is showing a 1064MHz clock speed due to Intel's Speed Step Technology, which scales down CPU clock speed when possible to conserve power. 32 bit Vista is sucking the life-blood from your computer and noticeable gains could definitely be gained by utilizing Win. 7 x64. For still better performance, try a Linux distro such as Linux Mint 11 or Ubuntu 11.04 (x86_64). Also, many decently equipped laptops are hamstrung by use of slower 5400rpm hard drives. You would notice a decent tactile improvement by installing a 7200rpm HDD or an SSD. Replacing the hard drive on an E6500 is extremely easy and takes all of five minutes and the removal of 5 screws.

 

[morabors]

Thanks for the response. I did a lot of tweaking and got the boot time down a ton. I know that if I remove all the Dell start up crap it would be even better but like I said I bought this for my daughter in college so I have a 4 year warranty and did not want to screw too much with it. Once she graduates I will delete all the Dell crap and move to W7. Thanks again.