Vista laptop optimization + Ubuntu->Fedora

[Pu-239]

So my T61 arrived, and I ordered it w/ Vista w/ the intent of using it w/ 4GB of RAM. Unfortunately, since I'm currently low on funds due to delayed paychecks, I'm stuck on 1GB of RAM.

What steps should I take to remove some of the bloat? I've already killed indexing to reduce hard drive usage which irritates me, and removed a bunch of the OEM provided bloat.

I did have to install Visual Studio for work.

C:\windows\winsxs still takes up 8GB ( , bigger than my entire Ubuntu root including applications). I've read that manually removing anything here is bad, but is there anything else that can be done to trim disk usage, as this won't be my primary OS?

I'm also considering switching from Ubuntu to Fedora for kicks (plus RPMs tend to be more readily available). Anybody have any tips on repos to add?

[RThurmont]

You might well add livna.org, which provides software that Red Hat doesn't, i.e. proprietary stuff, et cetera. Add it at your own risk however (I've personally never needed it, Red Hat's guidelines seem fine to me).

From what I hear Fedora 9 is extremely unreliable, shipping with a pre-Beta Samba release, among other faults. I've heard more complaints about it than I have about Ubuntu Hardy, which has acquired somewhat of a reputation locally as not living up to its codename. Fedora 8 is still supported and seems to be working for a lot of people, so I'd suggest you use it for now.

The main annoyance with Fedora is the absurdly short support lifecycle and the fact that the releases seem to vary widely in quality, with Fedora 7 and 8 being good, 9 being bad, and before those, Fedora Core 5 and 6 being viewed as problematic compared to FC4. At that I'd still install it over Ubuntu, any time.

[Dominus Atheos]

The obvious answer is buy more ram. It's not exactly expensive right now. You can add another gig for $20 before a $12.50 mail-in rebate. Or if all the SO-DIMM slots on it are full, buy this for $41 before a $15 dollar mail-in rebate. Even if you have to wait until those delayed paychecks come in, this is probably going to be your best bet to increase performance.

[Xon]

You shouldn't be delete files to reduce bloat, only if you are running stupidly low on diskspace which will impact write performance heavily which inturn will make write performance suffer to high fragmentation (aka 1000s of fragments for small files). A good rule of thumb is 5%-15% of the disk in freespace depending on your harddisk. The smaller it is, the larger the percentage in free diskspace to avoid write perfomance degradation.

Turn down graphics settings, and probably not use the Aero/glass stuff depending on how crap the graphics chipset is.

[Pu-239]

Well, I'll be dual booting and Linux will be my primary OS, so I want the Windows partition to be as small as possible w/o being too small as to induce severe fragmentation. I intend to allocate 60GB or so to Windows, so having half of it all gone before I even start installing any games is a problem (it'll probably just be SupCom, WiC if I can find the disk, MTW2, and/or Spore when it comes out; although I might be satisfied just leaving them only on the desktop) .

Right now after install VS2005 and OpenOffice, among some other small stuff, my C:\ has 32GB in use (or 22 according to WinDirStat ). Of this space, 16.8GB is taken up by Windows (according to Windows Explorer), 8GB of which are in c:\windows\winsxs . I believe prior to getting a 2nd hard drive, my desktop windows partition was only 50GB (also running Vista x64). Programs take up ~5GB, the largest of which is Visual Studio at 2.5 .

I've left Aero on since my graphics chipset is fairly decent (Quadro 140m), and it does seem to make various GUI stuff appear smoother. Performance problems seem to lie in disk I/O and memory, though probably wouldn't be as bad since all I've been doing so far is installing/uninstalling crap. The biggest concern is disk space though.

One more thing- how do I change the color in the menus for legacy apps? I utterly hate the light blue that appears in the menu for default Firefox and Pidgin (fixed the former w/ a theme), but I haven't used Vista enough other than games until now for me to bother doing anything about it.

[Beowulf]

Vista optimization

[Sarevok]

Well VS 2005, Openoffice, Firefox, Media player runs simultaneously on my crud laptop with Vista home premium. And I have Aero, gadgets and OEM crap running in background. I don't think you will need serious upgrades if all your doing is some coding and typing text documents. As much as I despise bloat it's been quite fun to code or browse the web with Vista's shiny interface.