Speed up a laptop with an additional device?

Question

I'm just curious what do you think about a suplimentary device that would increase a laptop's speed. I using my laptop both at university and at home. At home I would need more horse power for my laptop although not that much like I would need a desktop. Is there any supplimentary device that could turn my laptop into a more powerful machine? For example a desktop computer can be speed up if it will be joined with other computer via very fast network. This is how clusters a build. Would it be possible to make the same with a laptop.

Is there such a device? If there is not would you like to have need one?

Answer 1

No, is the basic answer.

More RAM might help if it doesn't already have plenty.

One of those cooling desk mounts might make a difference if it is slow due to throttling its CPU and/or GPU under high load in order to avoid overheating.

Replacing the disk drive with something faster might make a difference if that is your main bottle-neck.

You could try overclocking the CPU if such a thing is possible with your laptop model, but I'd strongly recommend against that even if it is possible.

Without more detail (make/model/spec of laptop, what is running slower than you'd like, ...) it is not possible to give more a specific answer.

Answer 2

1. Dump the bloat: Using RevoUninstaller (free), uninstall all your bloat-ware.
2. Go to Black Vipers web site (blackviper.com), get the minimalist services list and only use the services you really need, i.e. edit your services.
3. Edit your startup apps.
4. If your running Vista a 2gb USB flash drive dedicated to "ReadyBoost".
5. More RAM.
6. Solid state hard drive, (best if used with Win7 "trim" function).
7. Replace single CPU with a dual core if they make one for your socket.

Listed in ascending order of cost.

Answer 3

Such a device does not exist to my knowledge. You can upgrade the memory which is pretty easy and inexpensive and try booting your operating system of a USB Disk which will improve your read and write speeds.

Answer 4

More ram will make the laptop feel more "peppy" when you have lots of things running at once... A faster hard drive will make programs load INTO memory faster, like loading Windows and getting a usable desktop will be faster... The faster the hard drive, the more information it can get at a time, and the hard drive is almost always your bottleneck.

Answer 5

A nice thing about solid state drives is that they are a significant upgrade that you can install in a laptop (see here).

Answer 6

Depends on your work load. Your idea of making a sort of cluster is useful if your workload fits that kind of work. For example, with distcc you can spread your software compilation on several networked machines. Obviously, this only helps if you do a lot of code compilation.

Answer 7

Upgrade the ram to atleast 2GB. You can also Upgrade the proccessor and Harddrive. Get a faster harddrive which while allow you to read/write files quickly. Also try using windows readyboost with a flashdrive. I'm running windows 7 on my lappie and it is very fast

Answer 8

+1 for using a SD card or USB drive as a ReadyBoost Drive.

Once you have hit the max for onboard RAM the ReadyBoost drive is the best solution.

I like to use CCleaner or Glary Utilities to reduce the number of programs that load up each time you start your machine. So many programs load themselves in there whether you actually need them or not.