Reformatting and drivers

[Super Fast]

Yeah Google Chrome seems very snappy and it would install quite fast as well. Feels neater than IE or Firefox to me.

Although I recommend it for light use & lower end hardware, if you have decent hardware, Firefox a lot better choice.

Open 150 or more tabs in Chrome, & it suffers, struggles, 100% CPU use, can't do anything.

 

Firefox still runs as though no tab is open.

For high end machines, Firefox has no equal (yet).

 

Opera does not release memory (or they did not at one time, though I have to test later versions)

[cc1]

Another choice for low end machines may be Google Chrome.

 

Yeah Google Chrome seems very snappy and it would install quite fast as well. Feels neater than IE or Firefox to me.

 

Thanks for suggesting Google Chrome. I tried out the portable version and it's faster than FF on this old laptop. YouTube video's play smoothly in IE8 and GC. Pretty jerky, though, with FF.

 

So it looks like I'm settling on the combination of Panda Cloud for the AV, Sandboxie for additional browser protection, IE8 and GC. Actually, after the reformat and subsequent installation of drivers, service packs, Windows updates, and Office 2007, this old laptop doesn't perform too terribly badly. I plan on returning it to my friend this weekend.

[Guest TexShane]

Dropping 130 bucks on Windows 7 would save you days, as XP is only supported until 2014, and I think Win7 is good until 2021 or such, and it finds all the drivers for you, and is a nice change from XP.