How did you make your e1505/6400 better? - Page 2

So would you do a clean install, then load all of your drivers so it's working perfectly, then make the image?

I've always been a little hesitant to do the clean install with all the horror stories of malfunctions if you overlook something.

That's an option.

What I technically do is a clean install - Windows only with maybe MS updates. This is my base image for playing around with stuff or when I want to have a fresh start. I'll maybe put software on here that's not likely to change from fresh install to fresh install e.g. Office. There aren't too many apps like that though. I'll also do all of the tweaks I mentioned before e.g. turning off disk indexing.

Then I'll probably install pretty much everything ekse I use on a regular basis e.g WinRAR, do the Dell updates (the reason I don't do this in my previous version is that they sometimes get upgraded and I'd want to add those upgrades later), etc. and go from there. This is my working system configuration. Before any major changes or if there's some software I want to try out but not sure I'll keep, I do an image so I can revert back to a "clean" pre-install state. I prefer this to uninstalling the program and having it leave registry entries, .dlls, etc. behind.

Every 6-8 months or so, I tend to do "spring cleaning" and go back to my original image. This is particularly true if there are several major software upgrades that I will now want to use e.g. Nero going from v6 to v7. While I may have upgraded over the previous few months, now I can do a fresh version install i.e. just installing 7 instead of updating 6 to 7.

I don't think it's a big deal.

Here's the beauty of Acronis though. By the way, it's a paid program. You can make an image of your computer when you get it. Format, do whatever you want, and decide you don't like it or you broke something and then restore that image and have your system as it was before you reformatted.

I think this may only be possible though if you don't mess with the partitions. Not 100% sure though.

I don't know how Acronis would like you making the image, then formatting and getting rid of the Media Direct partition and then trying to restore the old image once it's gone. Shouldn't be a problem though.

umm, i got an m140, but yea, u can really tweak computers to get them to perform much much better. with my one, after a clena isntall, and all programs installed, i had 41 processes running. after careful tweaking, i managed to get 29-30 processes running in idle, and a total boot time of 36 seconds, that incldues tunring it on, all programs laodig up and internet connected 100% via wireless. how i done this, turned off unwanted progrmas loading up via msconfig, disabled servies through services.msc, turning off "indexing service" on all drives, turning off system restore & hibernation.!!!!!

remove the dell badging .. that should fix half of the problems to occur in the future

i jsut tweaked my notebook even more, got processes down to 27-28, total boot time till net connected is now 34 second!!!!!

what i do, when i adjust the services.msc, everytime i disable something, i write it down, and restart after i do around 5 things, jsut to make sure everything is working. and repeat this, till i disabled all the things i do not need. i rememer, the first time i played around with this, i lost my internet connection, and had to enable everything, just to get back online!, so write it down, easier!

I modded a 32" LCD flat screen onto mine... it shortened the battery life some.. and made it weigh more.. but hey bigger screen.