Hands on: Lighten your laptop's load

"By trimming the startup items I got it down to three and a half minutes for connecting to the BBC home page.

"But your tip about looking at the disk usage in resource monitor persuaded me that the supplied 80GB 5,400rpm drive was just too slow.

“So I purchased a Seagate Momentus 7200.02 200GB drive, reinstalled Vista from the supplied recovery media, imported my previously saved settings and files, and the results were outstanding.

"From pressing the power button to connecting to the BBC home page now takes just one and a half minutes, faster than my quad-core XP desktop.

"To run Photo Gallery takes about 10 seconds longer and after about four and a half minutes, the disk activity falls to virtually zero.”

This is a great result, and upgrading the drive to one with a faster spin speed would have improved the performance. Playing equal significance though was a fresh installation of the OS, which would have cleaned out any hidden startup items installed over time, or by the original supplier.

Malcolm Herring wrote to ask which items I removed from my own Vaio laptop to improve startup times while it was still running Vista. There was certainly no rocket science on my part: my Vaio was supplied full of unwanted software, so it was simply a case of removing anything with their names from the startup options. This significantly improved my startup times, but switching to XP remained the best long-term choice.

During two months of running XP on my Vaio I have no regrets. The only technical hitch came when my own copy of Cyberlink’s PowerDVD failed to play any DVDs or video files. I believe this was down to an incompatibility with the graphics hardware, as downloading the ‘WinDVD for Vaio’ package from Sony’s support site fixed the problem.

If you’re dissatisfied with the performance of a Vista laptop, do some spring cleaning on the startup items, then consider ‘downgrading’ to XP. It’s an increasingly popular solution, with many satisfied owners who’ll attest to the improvement.