TP200SA Revitalized

Rescuing an Asus TP200SA – A Lightweight Laptop Story

This article is about an Asus TP200SA 2-in-1 covertible laptop, but it applies equally to any lightweight laptop. A lightweight laptop would typically be one with a low-powered processor, a small eMMC hard drive and the bare minimum of ram. In addition, they’re not usually upgradable except for an expansion card slot.

This laptop is slim, pretty and very lightweight with all-day battery life.

But performance-wise, this laptop was about as bad as it gets; nearly full 32GB eMMC hard drive, 2 GB ram, and a celeron processor. It was painfully slow when I first tried it out, like Go-make-coffee-and-drink-2-cups-while-you-wait-for-reebee slow.

My customer wanted to use it for email, viewing online flyers, and web browsing. But she needed to run some fairly heavy apps, like Microsoft Word, from time to time.She was about ready to chuck it and buy a bigger laptop. When I was done with it, she was happy again. It wasn’t a supercomputer, but it became surprisingly quick.

Here’s what I did.

1. Freed up hard drive space
2. Increased virtual ram and set performance to maximum
3. Turned off indexing

1. Freed up hard drive space

A big issue appeared right away; the C: drive had 1.2 GB of space left. But there was little other than Windows on it; most of the bloatware had already been removed, and the apps were installed to an SD card. Turns out, it shipped with Windows 8 on it and had been upgraded to Windows 10. The installation and restore files had been removed, but the Windows folder was still inexplicably huge.

If you have sufficient space on your hard drive, you could skip freeing up hard drive space.

After a frustrating attempt to reduce Windows 10’s footprint, I bit the bullet and prepared to clean the hard drive and reinstall Windows 10. First I downloaded the drivers from the manufacturer’s website to make sure we could get them. She had no files, otherwise I would have backed those up as well. I also took a pic of her Start screen so that I could put all her tiles back where they were when I was done.

I created Windows 10 64-bit installation media on a 32 GB flash drive using Microsoft's tool. It was tricky to get the laptop to boot from USB; I had to go into the bios and enable the option.

During installation I deleted the main partition and recreated it. After the installation, Windows had shrunk down to 16GB, leaving 12.6 GB free on the C: drive. I set new apps to install on the microSD card (E: drive) that lives in the expansion slot.

Then I installed all the drivers and apps. The C: drive showed 11.1 GB of free space. Now there was lots of room.

Increased Performance Settings and Virtual RAM

(Click the images to zoom in)
I typed system in Cortana search and then clicked System when it appeared.









I clicked Advanced System Settings on the left, then in the System Properties window, the Advanced tab. In the Performance box, I clicked Settings to open Performance Options.

I checked the option for Adjust for best performance. This turns off the unnecessary pretty stuff.













I clicked the Advanced tab at the top of Performance Options. Under Virtual memory I clicked Change.


I checked the Custom Size option and set Initial size to 500MB and Maximum size to 4000 MB. The laptop was pretty light on RAM, and we now had tons of space on the C: drive, so I wanted to allow lots of room for apps to run. I clicked Okay on all the boxes to close them.

 

Turned Off Indexing

Indexing eats up a lot of resources in Windows. Since the customer wasn't using her computer to store docs, she didn't really need search. So I wanted to turn it off.

I typed manage in Cortana and then clicked on Computer Management.





At the left of the Computer Management app I clicked Services and Applications, and then I clicked Services.

In the list of services I had to scroll way down until I found Windows Search; I clicked that, clicked More Actions on the right, and then clicked Properties.

I set Startup Type to Disabled. Manual or Automatic (delayed) options might work too.

Once again, I Okay'd all the boxes.

 

 

 

Testing

I tried all installed apps and various heavy web pages. Everything ran quickly with no lock ups.

I also advised her to close apps when she’s done using them instead of just returning to the desktop. That way, resource usage wouldn’t pile up as she goes from task to task.

Sorry ma’am, no time for coffee anymore.