How to Get Your Old Xp Laptop Ready for School

this is my guide to get your old pc ready for school ,because sometime you just dont have the money to buy a new laptop.
i use these tips every few months to speedup my pc .
my laptop is a 4 year old acer aspire that runs windows xp and a lot of free opensource software.
 most of the clean up steps and apps will also work in windows vista and windows 7

Step 1: Speeding Up Windows Part 1

first thing to do is clean up of your system
 goto start > all programs > accessories > system tools > disk cleanup

select the c:\ drive > select al catagory's and press ok.

this wil free up system space and will make you laptop run faster ,because windows will not have to keep track of all those unneeded files

Step 2: Speeding Up Windows Part 2

cleaning up your  recent documents
 this is for the people that dont use my recent documents .

my recent documents is a feature of windows that loads the most recently  used files in to memory for if its needed later and if these files are large files the will take a lot of memory.
slowing down your pc . because i dont  use this feature a  lot i will show you how to clean the list and disable  it .

go to the startbar and right-click on a empty place of it  > go to click properties > click on the button "start menu" on the top > click on "customize"  > click on "advance" on the top > click on "clear list " > uncheck "list my most recently opened documents" > "ok" then "ok"

Step 3: Speeding Up Windows Part 3

defragmenting your harddrive

when you use windows ,windows  will constantly move bits and pieces of files from one place to a other on your harddrive and this causes the files to be scattered over the whole hardedrive after a while .
because of this, it will take the system a long time to retrieve and open a file.

what defragmentation those is the place the file in a way that it is easy for the system to find  and retrieve .

go to start > all programs > accessories > system tools > click disk defragmenter.

the program will open.
click on analyze .
this will analyze your drive to see if it is fragmented .
if it is fragmented  click on "defragment " .
it can take a some time if your drive very fragmented.
so leave it to finish .

Step 4: Usefull Software to Have on Your Laptop or Pc

i have a lot of free and opensource app on my pc .
it is because it often well kept and very up to date

for internet i use K-meleon web browser
it was made for developers but it pretty goed for normal use  i have been using it  now for a few years.
the link    http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/

why ?
i use it because it fast and lighter then firefox and  has a lot of feature's built-in that have to be installed in firefox
i use my cellphone as a modem to connect to the internet  so i need  it to react fast so i dont get bored .
only problems are that hotmail keeps thinking it a mobile browser and it sometimes screws up the layout  ,but the speed great.

multimedia

i use vlc media player  for audio - and video playback and encoding.
it has a lot of cool effects and supports a lot formats.
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/


audio editing

i use audacity for audio editing and mixing .
i had to dance once for school so i used audacity to make my music mix and everyone loved it.
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

beat creator

i  dont use lmms a lot  ,but it great for creating my own beats and house music.
http://lmms.sourceforge.net/


cd and dvd burning tool

for burning cd and dvd i use CDburnerxp it very usefull .
http://cdburnerxp.se/

pdf reader
for pdf files i use foxit reader , because its small and easy to use.
http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader/

word processing
i normally use microsoft office ,but a good alternative is abiword or open office
for abiword http://www.abisource.com/
for open office http://www.openoffice.org/

image editing
 i use GIMP for editing my images and to modify almost al my foto's.
all the images in this instructable were created via "Ctrl+PrtSc" ,saved in paint and edited in GIMP.
http://www.gimp.org/

youtube saving

i use youtube downloader to download usefull video
.http://youtubedownload.altervista.org/

zip files

i use winrar to compress files and unzip zip files and many other formats.
(winrar is not free but can be use after the trail to unzip and, unrar files and many other formats ,only it compression is very low.)
http://www.rarlab.com/