I've recently done a few things to my laptop that has SIGNIFICANTLY improved my performance, so I thought I'd share those really quick.
Obviously, a memory upgrade is easy, quick, and very inexpensive. That's a no brainer. Do it now and max it out.
I've also purchased a solid-state internal hard drive. Booting up and shutting down in Windows is agonizingly slow - as most of you know. With the solid-state drive, it's extremely fast. Just a couple seconds. I never thought Windows could run like this. The solid-state drive is pretty expensive though, and you may not get one as large as you want due to the cost constraints, so I would recommend using it for your more active files and programs, and system directories.
Finally, I've noticed that occasionally my machine will start running at 100% CPU utilization when I'm browsing the internet. I've found that this is due to flash. Flash ads, etc. end up going haywire for some reason and take my machine. I've installed flash ad blockers for both firefox and IE to prevent this from happening. And now it doesn't!! Just do a search in Google for flash ad blocker and you'll get plenty of free solutions.
Hope that helps!
