Now, that’s optimized!

With the success of “Everything but the Ref” article (subjective though), I thought of following up with something of the same level. I have been having particular liking to the word “optimizing” and I would like to share with you my thoughts on the matter. It is a broad topic in itself, but as we are into tech stuff here, I will zero in on my other device: the tiny PC in Eee. This article is about optimization of the Asus EeePC.

We talk about optimization when we want the most out of something. For instance, optimizing my palm pda, I use it as dictionary to look up the meaning of the word “optimize”. According to the Webster program in my zire, “optimize” means “to make as perfect, effective, or functional as possible”. A device then is effective, thus optimized, if it works with its full potential, if not more. We can actually speak here of 101% as I believe I am making my eee work more than it potentially is capable.

The desktop of my eeepc currently looks like this:

I beg you to hold your comments for a second. Much as I would be delighted to be called “tech savvy”, I am not. With such a desktop you might be thinking I am a geek, but I apologize I have to burst your bubble. I am an ordinary computer user like you. Rest assured what you will be getting from this article are not the technical details or hacks. I am just a curious individual who has Mr. Google as his buddy. I owe much to googling the net for useful utilities.

The eeepc is just a small laptop, so people mistake it to be incapable of doing things a normal desktop would do. It has only 4 gigs of hard disk space and 512 megs of memory (pertaining to the eeepc 4g). Mine has 4gigs of hard disk space and I had the memory replaced by a 2gig apacer memory module. But still, with such specifications, the device can do only so little. Hence the need to optimize. The effects of the tweaking are certainly more than what I could ask for. Right now I could not possibly entertain the idea of replacing my eee because I am so preoccupied with all its wonders.

I have Windows XP installed in my eee (though it looks like vista, it is XP). I chose windows over Linux simply for convenience. Apart from the expected programs like MS Office, I have in my eee installed and fully functioning “huge” programs. Notable is Adobe Photoshop CS3, which has allowed me to work on numerous photo editing tasks to date (it is something really worth buying).

 

Installed in my device as well are portable fully-functioning programs. Portable programs have been very common lately. These are programs that you can store in a flash disk and run in any computer. Particularly enticing to portable applications is their size, they are usually small and free. Thus, they are very suited for the shortcomings of the eee. Among the programs I stored in my SD card (my main storage is apparently the SDHC card which has bigger capacity than the solid state drive of the eeepc) are Audacity (music editor), google earth, PDF Viewer, Poker game, and a Portable Flash. 

Programs that comprise the productivity team are Kaspersky (an anti-virus that is worth the penny), Geogebra, a program that allows computation and graphing of Math equations (I am a Math teacher), Firefox 3 (fast and secure web browser) to name a few. To complete the list though, and what sets my device apart from ordinary eee with XP installed, are the small programs/utilities I acquired from forums. Credit goes to the advanced users/programmers that spent time to craft programs that are very useful yet free. Most of these utilities can be seen in my taskbar. For one, there is the eeectl program which lets me see the current temperature of the device. It also allows me to overclock/underclock the CPU (or make it work faster or slower). Though eeepc is advertised to run at 900MH, it is actually underclocked to only 630MH, and eeectl allows me to make the device work at its full potential (with caution of course). Another useful program is the astray+, which allows me to have the common screen sizes (like 800×600 or 1024×768). With this I can play games normally. In fact, I have big games running on my small laptop. (Notable are Warcraft 3, Counter Strike and Porshe Unleashed)

 

 

Part of the definition of optimize is “perfection”. Having a beautiful desktop brings us closer to it. Making my user interface beautiful and functional are the programs I put on it. Among them are rocketdock (a launcher that is faster than the object dock), Rainlender that makes my laptop an organizer too, Clock of gljakal.com (a light program which displays transparent analog clock), and just recently, the TinyResMeter which informs me of the actual CPU speed and ram data (so I won’t be ignorant of the apparent condition of my device). These are really small yet effective programs. You might actually be using a sidebar or Google desktop in your pc and you know how they can slow down your device. The 4G version of the eeepc will have difficulty running such programs, so I stick to my equally enticing utilities.

 

With all these installed, all that is left to do is to configure the startup so that your eee is not slow in loading. Note that I have many other programs that initially run when my computer starts (like the Bluetooth tray, TV tray, etc). You can disable them, and thus run only the useful programs when your eeepc starts. You can do that by hitting run and typing “msconfig”. You will find the startup tab there and you can easily select the programs you want to run on startup.

 

All the rest are optional tweaking. I particularly like the vista look so I googled for vista msstyles. There are a lot of themes available; it is a matter of careful looking. It is in fact careful looking that will lead your device to being a more functional and close-to-perfect one. Now, isn’t that optimized?