Are we honestly stuck with X41T hard drive?

[Cerebus]

The biggest complaint I've been seeing regarding the X41T is the very slow 1.8" hard drive. What I have not seen in a quick review of threads on this topic is the idea of swapping the drive out with an improved model in the same form factor.

Is this not possible? If no replacement exists today, are we assuming that no improved product is in the pipe somewhere?

Personally, I love the X41T to death in all but the hard drive, and it would be more than worth it to me to purchase a new better performance drive when it's available, and I'm hoping that this will be the case.

[simscitizen]

Nope, and nope.

Sorry...

[Dragonfly79]

I am in your same boat. I am about to do a clean install of xp and I am wondering if removing the extra bloat, ie norton, franklin covey etc will make a difference in performance. Has anyone done this and can comment? I have my system up and running with the perfect setup and if doing the clean install doesn't improve performance I rather save myself the hassle.
Minh

[aabram]

I am in your same boat. I am about to do a clean install of xp and I am wondering if removing the extra bloat, ie norton, franklin covey etc will make a difference in performance.

Yes, it will. Noticeably. Especially awful resource hogs are all those integrated "av/fw/monitoring suites" à la Symantec IS, F-Secure and others. Use lightweight(er|ish) replacements if you can: Avast/AVG/Nod32 for antivirus, older Kerio for fw (or, if you're familiar with unix/bsd give WIPFW a try, it can't get any smaller than that) and so forth.

Also if you're using lot of disk-intensive applications it would be good idea to turn off indexing on NTFS volumes as well as Last Access Timestamp (every time you read a file there is a write to disk to update the timestamp), use continuous swap-file, turn off system restore (if you like to de- and reinstall manually anyway, keep decent backups and are generally knowledgeable about your Windows) etc. Yes, clean install with only selected services, selected programs will make a world of difference over the standard preinstalled one.

[redskin]

I am in your same boat. I am about to do a clean install of xp and I am wondering if removing the extra bloat, ie norton, franklin covey etc will make a difference in performance.

Yes, it will. Noticeably. Especially awful resource hogs are all those integrated "av/fw/monitoring suites" à la Symantec IS, F-Secure and others. Use lightweight(er|ish) replacements if you can: Avast/AVG/Nod32 for antivirus, older Kerio for fw (or, if you're familiar with unix/bsd give WIPFW a try, it can't get any smaller than that) and so forth.

Also if you're using lot of disk-intensive applications it would be good idea to turn off indexing on NTFS volumes as well as Last Access Timestamp (every time you read a file there is a write to disk to update the timestamp), use continuous swap-file, turn off system restore (if you like to de- and reinstall manually anyway, keep decent backups and are generally knowledgeable about your Windows) etc. Yes, clean install with only selected services, selected programs will make a world of difference over the standard preinstalled one.

yes doing all the things that aabram said will help to speed up performance, but you are not going to get the performance like you would with a regular 2.5" hard drive.

[Dragonfly79]

thanks aabram and redskin. Now I feel confident in doing the clean install. I did it on my t42 and it made a world of a difference but I wasn't sure if it was do to the 7200rpm hard drive. I try the suggestions listed above and looking forward to a speedier machine with less bloat.
regards
Minh