Is your Netbook a Ninja Turtle or a Mountain Tortoise

Putting those online threat that may slowdown your netbook aside, how you upkeep your netbook can also helps in boosting it performance. Here are some useful tips which you may consider now or when you are getting a new netbook.

1) Max your RAM to 2GB
If you typically check e-mail, read Excel spreadsheets and surf five websites at the same time, the netbook lags. The bottleneck is often the RAM or memory. Most netbooks today offer 1GB of RAM and most have only one memory slot so you cannot stuff in more memory. What you can do is to max out the RAM. A 2GB RAM chip costs about $45 and try to trade in the original 1GB piece for a discount.

2) Buy an external DVD drive
With USB 2.0's fast speed, external drives no longer chug along and are as able as internal drives. Some external drives have two ends to its USB cable. The primary one plugs into the netbook's USB port for data access and power while the second one is to draw additional power. You rarely need the latter. So get a DVD burner drive for about $120 or double that amount for one with Blu-ray.

3) Stick to Windows XP
Vista is more resource-hungry and since your netbook has limited horsepower, go with the more popular and "petite" Windows XP. If you already have Windows Vista, try to "downgrade" to Windows XP. Check with your netbook vendor if it can be downgraded. If you buy a new netbook with Windows Vista, the good news is that you may be able to upgrade to the new Windows 7 operating system when it launches in October. So on the next IT Show (Sep/Oct), do check with the sale staff for free upgrade to Windows 7.

4) Get a larger battery
The standard three-cell battery will get you only about two hours of battery life. Pay for the six-cell ones for twice that amount of juice. If you are getting a new netbook, try trading the free gift for a better battery.

5) Clean your start-up programs
If your netbook takes forever to start, it is probably because you have too many programs that are loading automatically when you boot up. Go to Start, then Run and type in msconfig. Now click on the Startup tab and you will see a whole list of programs. Uncheck the programs that you do not really need running at all times. Every program hogs memory and processor resource. Disable them and watch your netbook vroom.

6) Enable write caching on disk
Go to Start, then Control Panel, then System. Click on the Hardware tab, then on Device Manager. You will see a list of components. Click on Disk Drives and right click on your hard disk drive's name.Choose Properties then click on the Policies tab and tick "enable write caching on the disk" to optimise performance. Please do not try this if your hard disk space is running really low. Also try not to save too many files on your desktop.

7) Switch to solid-state drive (SSD)
Flash-based solid state drives (SSDs) run a lot faster than hard disk drives and you will see big boosts in running applications, start-up and shut down speeds. Unfortunately, SSDs cost an arm and a leg - about $600 for an 80GB drive currently. However, prices are expected to halve over the next few months.

8) Boost your graphics performance
Almost all netbooks come with Intel's integrated graphics which are weak in supporting games. Download GMABooster (www.gmabooster.com) and install it to up the graphics performance by up to 2.5 times. It is still not good enough to let you play Far Cry but better some improvement than nothing.