LinuxPlanet: Hot Rodding Your Slightly Dated Laptop For Fun and Profit

“Are you skittish about putting Linux on your laptop because the
installation will be hard and it will be tough to find the right
drivers? Are you worried that you’re going to be limited to
command-line based applications, especially on that old corporate
laptop that moves like molasses under the weight of XP? Do you have
big reservations about putting a brand new $2500 2.0-Ghz whiz-bang
laptop on the X-ray belt at the airport?

“Fear not, fellow computer mechanics.

“You can put that slightly used road warrior back into service
with a new lease on life using Linux and a few laptop performance
secrets. With certain modifications you can expect to be able to
run the Linux desktop/window manager of your choice (including KDE,
Gnome or IceWM), an SQL server, Apache, Samba, OpenOffice.org, 5 or
6 Xterms and not really even break a sweat. I was happily computing
away just yesterday with 80 processes showing up on top!

“My hot-rodding tips apply to just about any recent laptop. You
may also be surprised to hear that there are some real
disadvantages to running the latest and greatest when it comes to
laptops. I’ll explain those later…”

Complete
Story