The first way to optimize your gaming laptop is to uninstall memory resident programs you don’t need. These little buggers hog memory and run in the background all the time. Remove them, and your laptop will start up faster, and you will also even eliminate some risk of getting viruses (some services are maliciously installed by spyware).

The next thing you can do to optimize your gaming computer is to remove background services which hog memory. Go to the Start menu, click on Run and type “services.msc”. You will see a list of services running in your laptop. Understand what they do by referring to this page http://snakefoot.fateback.com/tweak/winnt/services.html. One you determine which you don’t need, remove them to get better performance out of your laptop.

The registry is another place which slows down your laptop. It’s important to clear out clogged up registry entries which slow things down. You can download a registry cleaning utility called RegscrubXP which helps to do the job. Believe me, a clean registry will make your gaming laptop run faster and make it feel fresh.

Another important thing to do to optimize your gaming laptop is to download the latest DirectX drivers. If the graphics drivers are not updated, your games will simply not run efficiently. This is a notorious reason for games not performing well under Windows. Also, make sure your graphics card supports the latest DirectX drivers. You can run a DirectX diagnostic in Windows to see there are problems.

Another tip I’d recommend to you is to defragment your hard drive regularly. A hard drive really slows down in performance if it is fragmented. After being fragmented for a long time, it might even crash. So do remember to do a defrag once a week at least.

See those animated menus in Windows? Well, they’re nice to look at, but hey are memory hoggers. You don’t really need them – remove them to squeeze some more performance out of your laptop.

The final tip I’ve got for you is to do a full when you want to run games or applications. By doing a full install, you prevent the system from reading from the DVD. Everything is on the hard disk, so it should increases speed and performance significantly. Given that hard disks have so much space nowadays, this is something you should consider.