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Boosting the performance of the Lenovo S10e laptops
and other lower-powered or legacy
primary school and secondary school laptops and desktops

The information below gives you all the background information and steps you need to follow to optimise the performance of your Lenovo S10e laptops and other lower-powered or legacy primary school or secondary school laptops and desktop computers.

 (After you've read the information and instructions, and before you leave our web site, take a look at examples of what you can do with Adobe Captivate, because after you've read the information below you'll be able to ensure that the Adobe programs run well on your and your student's computers.  For a teacher Captivate is the most useful and easy-to-use of the entire Adobe suite, and it's for good reason that the members of the prestigious Californian Institute of Technology in Teaching nominated Adobe Captivate as "the most valuable formative assessment and teaching tool for K-12 teachers").

To see the examples of what you can do with Captivate follow this link:

 Pedacomp - Adobe Captivate Examples
 

Recent advances in USB thumb drive technology now make the performance enhancement features of Windows 7 so effective that ALL DEC secondary schools should urgently advise their teachers and students how to apply them to their Lenovo S10 L4L laptops.  And ALL DEC primary schools should now look at investing in the small cost of upgrading their older Windows XP and Vista laptops and desktops to Windows 7. 

BUT!!!...  it is critical that on lower-powered laptops and desktops (including the L4L Lenovo S10e laptops) you disable some Windows 7's performance-degrading features to help the computers work more effectively. 

(With the release of Service Pack 1 in March 2011, Windows 7 became the most powerful and reliable operating system Microsoft has ever produced.  Pedacomp's testing has found that by correctly applying Windows 7's performance-boosting features, and by correctly  disabling its performance-degrading features the Lenovo S10e laptops and older legacy laptops and desktops can achieve an up to 100% improvement in performance).

There are two simple steps required to achieve these benefits.  The section below provides all the guided information you'll need to apply these steps:

Task one:  Disable Aero

Aero is turned on by default in Windows 7.  Aero provides Windows 7 with its translucency, live thumbnails (image below) live icons, animations and "eye candy".

Higher-powered laptops accommodate Aero comfortably, but less powerful computers such as the Lenovo S10e laptops and older computers suffer degraded performance running Aero. Disabling Aero improves performance on these lower-power computers by releasing scarce memory to the operating system and to application programs.  Disabling Aero also relieves the display card from applying Aero animations leaving the card to allocate image processing power to application programs. 

Almost ALL unexplained system-freezing on lower-powered Windows 7 laptops (such as the Lenovo S10e) is related to Aero and can be eliminated by disabling Aero.

To disable Aero, follow the steps outlined below:
Right-click on the desktop and select Personalize
Scroll down through the Themes until you see the Basic and High Contrast Themes section:

 Select the Windows 7 Basic theme.

You have unloaded Aero.

You'll notice that the task-bar now looks similar to Windows XP. 

Note:  You can still  change the Windows Desktop background colour or use your own pictures as a background.

Task two: Obtain one of the new high-speed USB thumb drives
or SD cards and use it with ReadyBoost

What is ReadyBoost?

 When a laptop with a smaller size RAM (less than 2.5 to 3Gb) runs a large application or multiple applications it can run out of sufficient RAM to keep everything in memory.  To accommodate this the computer swaps out of RAM sections of the operating system or of working applications that it doesn't need at any particular moment, and stores them in a "paging" file on the disk drive.  When the computer again needs a swapped-out section it places in the paging file a different unused section from RAM and reads back into RAM the now required section. 

Because disk drive speeds are much slower than RAM this swapping of memory sections between RAM and the disk drive slows down the computer's performance.  The secondary school Lenovo S10e laptops with their 2Gb RAM (and older legacy laptops that generally have 2Gb or less RAM) suffer performance degradation from this page-swapping when running larger applications such as the Adobe applications, or when running multiple applications. 

ReadyBoost is a Windows 7 feature that was designed to address this.  It allows the computer to use a USB-memory stick, which is usually faster than a disk drive, to hold the paged-out sections. 

Unfortunately at the time Windows 7 was released ReadyBoost was largely ineffectual as USB-memory sticks were too slow to make much difference.  However that has changed dramatically and with the massive performance increases in USB-memory stick speed  ReadyBoost now can make a REAL difference to the performance of computers such as the Lenovo S10e and older laptops.

All DEC users of lower-powered laptops, such as the secondary school Lenovo S10e laptops and primary school older legacy laptops should now use Windows 7 and ReadyBoost to boost their laptop's performance.

 Note:  Not all USB-memory sticks are created equal!!  The range in performance is enormous and you should ensure that you use a fast USB memory stick.  Our testing was carried out with an 8Gb Transcend Ultra-speed USB stick which cost us $15 and which has one of the highest speeds we've seen - a 14Mb per second write speed and a 32Mb per-second read speed.

We've proved comprehensive instructions below on how to test the speed of your USB memory stick and how to set up and use ReadyBoost.

Formatting your USB memory stick


Formatting your USB memory stick to the correct settings is simple but vital.  Performance improves significantly with optimum formatting. 

Insert your USB stick into your computer, and when its disk icon appears right-click on the icon.
 
Select Format...
Click on the drop-down arrow for File system....


... and select exFAT.





(Leave the Quick Format checkbox ticked).
Click on the drop-down arrow for Allocation unit size and select 64 kilobytes.  This is the optimal size for maximising ReadyBoost's performance.

Then click Start
A box will show warning you that you will erase all data on the USB stick. Click OK (we assume that you have not put any files on the USB stick which you wish to keep, because they will be erased!) 
When the format is completed a box will appear.  Click on OK.

Testing your USB stick's speed

You have now formatted your USB stick ready for use with ReadyBoost.  However you may wish to test the speed of your USB stick to assess how effective it will be with Readyboost. 

The following steps illustrate how to do this.
Testing your USB stick's Write speed

Locate a large file on your computer (100MB or larger) and copy it to the USB stick. 

The Copying window will open.  Whilst the copying is continuing click on the More details icon.
The expanded window shows the write speed of your USB stick.
Testing your USB stick's Read speed

Locate the large file on your USB stick that you just copied from your computer, and copy it back to the computer. 

The Copying window will open.  Whilst the copying is continuing click on the More details icon.
The expanded window shows the read speed of your USB stick.
We'll now follow the steps to enable ReadyBoost on your USB stick.

Enabling ReadyBoost



Delete any files you may have placed on your USB stick during the above testing procedure.


Once again locate your USB stick drive icon, and right-click on it.
Open the Properties menu by clicking on Properties.
Select the ReadyBoost tab.
You can choose to dedicate the entire USB memory stick to ReadyBoost or only part of it to ReadyBoost and use the rest for storing files.

To Dedicate the device to ReadyBoost select the Dedicate this device to ReadyBoost button. 

To use some of the USB stick's memory in the normal way, i.e. to save files select the Use this device button and use the slider bar to select how much of the USB stick you wish to allocate to ReadyBoost. 

Our recommendation is to allocate no less than 4Gb to ReadyBoost, and more than that if you are able to.  For best results dedicate the USB stick to ReadyBoost. 

Note:  There is probably no point in using a USB stick of greater than 8Gb size as it is unlikely that a paging file of larger than 8Gb will be required.
You have now successfully enabled and initiated ReadyBoost. 

Note:  The ReadyBoost USB stick only stores currently unused pages, so you will not damage your system or freeze programs by accidentally removing it.  However, removing the USB stick without first doing a Safely Remove can damage the USB stick if the system is currently writing to it (as is the case with any removal of any USB stick without first doing Safely Remove).
If you do wish to remove the USB stick use the Safely Remove button to open the Safely Remove window, and eject the USB drive.   I
Note:  If you wish to Sleep or Hibernate your computer, the optimal way of doing this is to put your computer to Sleep or Hibernate first, and then remove the USB stick.  Then before powering up your computer again, insert the USB stick, and then power up.  HOWEVER you will not cause any damage to the computer or any problems to any applications if you forget to follow this sequence.