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Until Steve Jobs’ iPAD comes out, netbooks seems to be the leader in mobile computing, right behind smartphones. Photo via [slashgear]

Netbooks are convenient mainly because they use weaker computer parts than their predecessor chunky laptops and desktops did (do). For this reason, if you’ve got an HP, Dell, Acer, Asus, Lenovo or any other netbook running on any of our beloved Windows operating systems, then you’ll probably have experienced at least one of the following:

• Slower than desired speeds or
• Lesser than optimum performance

If you’re not too saavy, here’s a quick tip to improve speed, i.e. performance on your netbook that you probably didn’t know about.

Windows (and many other operating systems) runs itself and other programs in the background by utilizing a portion of your hard drive, called Virtual Memory. Think of this as sort of the work area of your netbook. The default work area (virtual memory) that Windows utilizes from your harddrive is approximately 1GB. If you’ve ever popped open a Facebook game, loaded Firefox or IE with 10+ tabs, fired up an online FPS game, all at the same time, you’ll probably have noticed a huge drag in performance as your netbook tries to keep up to your demands.

To increase performance, simply change the work area by increasing it to a value larger than 1GB. Honestly, with all these hungry applications and web apps nowadays, 1GB is chump change. The maximum seems to be around 4GB (it is for Windows XP at least), so changing this should definitely give you a boost.
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And while you’re at it, Windows also gives you the option of optimizing your netbook for performance over looks. If you can sacrifice a little beauty for a boost in performance, why wouldn’t you?

Right click MY COMPUTER
Click PROPERTIES
Click ADVANCED
Under Performance, click SETTINGS and make the necessary changes.

These are the instructions for Windows XP, at least.

Hope this helps make your life with your netbook a bit easier and more enjoyable.

Let’s hear what you have to say in the comments.