My wife has a netbook with Windows 7 Starter. It is extremely slow - even though the only program she ever uses is Internet Explorer - period!!! What Services can I change the status of without affecting her use of the netbook? I have already used MSCONFIG and shut everything off there except IE. No Startup programs running that I know of. I clean IE's cache often. Please help!!!!!!!!
📎 AI Summary:
The thread discusses ways to improve the performance of a slow Windows 7 Starter netbook, with suggestions including disabling unnecessary services and using tools like Autoruns to manage startup items. Some contributors advise against tinkering with services due to potential system instability, recommending hardware upgrades such as an SSD. A few members suggest switching to lightweight Linux distributions like Mint Mate as an alternative solution, with one user offering guidance on installation. The overall sentiment emphasizes cautious optimization and exploring alternative OS options for better performance.
The thread discusses ways to improve the performance of a slow Windows 7 Starter netbook, with suggestions including disabling unnecessary services and using tools like Autoruns to manage startup items. Some contributors advise against tinkering with services due to potential system instability, recommending hardware upgrades such as an SSD. A few members suggest switching to lightweight Linux distributions like Mint Mate as an alternative solution, with one user offering guidance on installation. The overall sentiment emphasizes cautious optimization and exploring alternative OS options for better performance.
Solution
whs
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Playing with the services is not going to help. All you end up with is a bricked system. Apart from the usual cleanup tasks there is little you can do. Netbooks have slow Atom processors and slow disks. If you can replace the disk with a SSD, you would get a big performance boost for the system, but not on the internet because that depends on your line speed.
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It's worth downloading a copy of autoruns (free). It will enable you to identify all the things which are run at startup time which will be consuming some resources. If unsure about any item you may initially use autoruns to flag any items which you don't want to run. If it causes a problem then you may unflag it. Any items you are sure you want to remove from startup may permanently be removed. Autoruns is just run as is, it does not require installation but to allow changes to be made it needs to be run as administrator.
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902.aspx
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902.aspx
whs
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If you want a really nice Linux distro, use Mint Mate. Here is a video demo that I made to give you an idea. That one is running from a USB stick, but it looks the same when installed.
I have a tutorial to install it on a stick - if you want to try that first. The installation on the internal disk is no different than any OS installation. You start with an .iso on a DVD or a stick..
I have a tutorial to install it on a stick - if you want to try that first. The installation on the internal disk is no different than any OS installation. You start with an .iso on a DVD or a stick..
