Stupid, Old Compaq

I have not yet been discouraged by a lack of traffic to my weblog. I have just been too frustrated to care about that. You see, it's my old notebook that is causing me severe problems.

Ariving at the office today, a beautiful and sunny morning, my outlook of the day entirely changed. My computer took ages to boot, then Microsoft Outlook took forever to load & synchronize my e-mail. I poured myself a stiff cup of coffee. Cup of motivation in hand, i could become productive.

Unfortunately for me, things were not getting any better. Mac, the name I've given my Compaq laptop (perhaps in anticipation that he could one day mysteriously transform into a Mac), just did not want to perform. The disk-seek light flashed like a disco. Task Manager showed near 100% CPU utilization. What could this all be attributed to? I had no idea?

All that I could think of doing was to

Delete the files in C:\Windows\Prefetch

Defrag my hard-drive

Stop some apps from automatically starting on boot.

Wow, total performance gain now, possibly 0.3%. I have lots of faith in Windows XP, but because of performance, i question it often. XP is a hungry, resource instensive operating system. Outlook is a resource intense application. Total memory that Mac has 768Mb but i need both these tools to be productive.

Delon