When You're Stuck with a Netbook...

[thismafiaguy]

I can understand the general purpose of netbooks; they're meant to be highly portable with extreme battery life and are only intended to browse the interwebz or to write research papers with. But even the simplest task seem to knock my netbook on its arse.

I've upgraded to 2GB of RAM so that's not such a bottleneck anymore, but I simply can't imagine how Intel concluded that a CPU of this majestic speed in the bloody 21st century is even remotely acceptable. I've uninstalled and turned off just about everything, yet I still see the CPU usage go through the ceiling every time I launch the browser or load a webpage. And forget video playback, I'd get more frames per second in Powerpoint.

What would you do in this situation? I don't have any spyware or viruses, this netbook has hardly ever been used due to its monumental performance. I've done every optimization I can think of. It's a Dell Inspiron Mini 1012, and it has 2GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD, running Windows 7 Starter.

I'm stuck with it for now because I haven't had the budget to build my new desktop after I dismantled my rig and decided to start over. I had an FX-8350 and 16GB of RAM, so I'm sure you can imagine that this transition was a bit...difficult for me.

 

[burdenbound]

Not much you can do, the processor is only so fast. Why did you have to scrap your desktop?

 

[USAFRet]

And this is why the netbook concept died out. They can only do so much, and even that not very well.

 

[thismafiaguy]

I scrapped my old rig because I had problems with the OS(Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit), or so I thought initially. It turned out to be a really strange case of SSD failure. The SSD was completely accessible via a dock, but it will not initialize the OS upon booting. But when I figured this out, I was already on my way towards a new setup.

There was nothing "wrong" with my old rig, it was great and it played everything maxed out without breaking a sweat. I ran a GTX 670 FTW along with my FX-8350, it was a very solid gaming platform. But unfortunately it was crippled by the SSD failure, and I decided to sell the parts and build a new rig. I guess you could say I tore down the house because the A/C broke.

To be honest, I was bored of the generic ATX tower. I wanted something a bit more uncommon and fun to play with, and I decided to go to a Mini-ITX platform. But since there aren't any Mini-ITX motherboards for my 8350, I had to ditch the 8350 as well. When this is all done and my new rig is built, on paper it would seem like I spent over $400 to gain maybe a 10% performance increase overall. But everything except for the graphics card and CPU cooler would be new, and very compact. You could say I'm doing this mostly for fun.