Tweeking a Sub Notebook

parallax7d

I have a new Fujitsu P1120 sub notebook. It's like 2 pounds, which rocks, but it's slow. It has a 800 MHz Crusoe chip, a mobility radeon and XP Home. I don't use it for games, just multimedia, browsing, and misc programs.
I've cleaned up the startup programs, and stopped alot of unneeded services. What else can I do to get this bad boy running faster? Is there any way to overclock the CPU without any options in the bios? Also, it has 256 MB of ram, and around 100 are free at any given time, would it be worth it to upgrade the ram?

Thanks for your help,
Parallax

MiDKnYtE

Definitely upgrade the ram to at least 512. That should help.

I doubt you can OC that cpu, but I wouldn't recommend it even if you could. The laptop is designed for a certain thermal tolerance. you can't upgrade the heatsink or fans, so overclocking and adding heat would make the system unstable and possibly damage the cpu.

parallax7d

Sounds good, but what would be the reason more ram would give you better performance? Even when playing divx movies I have about 100 MB ram free.

But, the cpu goes to 100% and drops a lot of frames, it's really noticable. The audio is smooth, but the video is a little jerky. Is it just not possible to play divx movies with an 800 MHz Crusoe CPU? One of the reasons I got this machine was to watch movies, people seem to watch divx movies on PDA's with 400 Mhz CPU's, so I assumed they run better on this laptop.

Would hacking the mobility radeon that came with it help?

parallax7d

Ok, so I found a great free video converter called Pocket Divx Encoder, and if I convert my movies to 480x360 resolution @ 20 fps my laptop can render them without frame drops, so I guess that will be the solution to that one. But I'm still wondering why I should upgrade to 512 MB ram if I always seem to have 100 MB free, I could have winamp open, firefox, and play a divx movie and sitll have about 100 MB free.

Thanks for your help so far.
Parallax