How to Tuneup Your Netbook - tune and speed up your HP Mini or Aspire One

Netbooks can have very small hard drives. On my first netbook, I opted to get a solid state hard drive. At the time they offered an 8 gig and 16 gig size options. I chose the 16 gig one. When I got the laptop I checked the storage space and 8 gigs had already been used up by the operating system. That left me with another 8 gigs of memory, which quickly disappeared the first day as I installed my favorite must have programs.

Thankfully, USB Flash Drives and Memory Cards have grown in size and are dirt cheap. I was very happy when I found out that I could get a 32 gig Flash Drives or SD cards for under $100. I picked up one of each and my netbooks storage capacity grew 5 times larger.

The next problem that I encountered was that my netbook was running very slow. I noticed that files I launched from my sd card or usb drive were the problematic ones.

In order to prevent possible data corruption or loss when you hot swap, (remove while it is still on) a removable storage device, like a USB Flash Drive or Memory Card, by default windows will cache the data while it writes it. That way if you unplug the removable storage device before it is done writing any changes, it does not corrupt your files. Because of the added overhead, this feature is that it causes theses drives to function slower.

If you are planning on regularly removing the flash drive or memory card you should leave it set to the default optimization for quick removal. However, if you plan on running applicaitons from it and leaving it plugged in most of the time, you should consider setting the Flash Drive or Memory Card for optimized performance.

Just make sure that you do not pull the Flash Drive or Memory Card out without removing it safely by unmounting the drive first.

Optimize your drive for performance in Windows XP

Some netbooks, like the HP Mini, actually have a recessed USB drive which you can install a small USB flash drive inside of the laptop without having the USB stick protruding out of the laptop. As these internal USB flash drives are not ment to be swapped out regularly, their is no need to optimize them for quick removal and they should be set to optimize for performance.

You can also get a Portable External Hard Drives, which will offer much more space. You can get a small USB External Hard Drive, however, you may not always want to carry it around with your netbook.

One of the cheapest and easiest hardware upgrades you can do is upgrading your memory.

Most netbooks have a panel on the bottom marked with memory or small icon of a memory stick which can be opened by removing one or two small screws. Once removed the memory can be simply swapped out. Detailed instructions for your particular netbook can be found in your user guide or by searching online for your netbook name and model number followed by "memory upgrade instructions" .

The hardest part to upgrading your memory is selecting the correct memory. Before you buy any memory make sure that it is the correct memory for your computer.

There are many tweeks that are specific to your individual netbook. You can learn a lot about the ins ans outs of your netbook by joining these online groups.