There are plenty of little things you can do to improve performance, speed, and battery longevity on your NetBook. Amongst some of the obvious and simple things to do are:
1. keep tabs on NetBook screen brightness (keep it bright enough to use, but realize that this is a major battery drain).
2. Use flash memory as a Memory Booster in Windows Vista or Windows 7 (this is about as cheap a performance boost as you are likely to find).
3. IF you don’t use the integrated webcam much (or at all), it would seem pretty obvious to turn it off, since it also continuously burns power. You can do this by going to the device manager in the Windows control panel.
Ten Ways to Better NetBook Battery Life
4. While you are turning off the integrated webcam, consider doing the same thing with your Bluetooth radio (that is, if you have little or no use for it…)
5. There are some pretty obvious software replacements which will diminish some of the recourse usage of your NetBook. The first on my list is to replace Adobe Acrobat Reader with almost any of the freeware replacements out there, such as Foxit Reader 1.3. In a general sense, the fewer application you have running, and the fewer applications you have on your4 system the better. This is a case of some subtle and crafty application management to get the most speed and least system lag (fewer apps =smaller registry, which in turn leads to a slightly less sluggish machine).
6. Take some time to modify or fine tune the applications which you do keep. A good example of this is to check out the Meerkat plugin for Firefox, this plugin fine tunes your browser in that it hides (when not used) such real estate hogs as the status bar, and some other tricks to get you nearly 10% more screen space for the webpages in your browser.
7. Use any of the cloud storage tools out there such as: EverNote, DropBox, any of the online backup services (such as Mozy or Carbonite), and look into trying out the (new) Microsoft Security Essentials (a free antivirus suite from Microsoft which has, for me, the best performance of any of the multitude of antivirus and anti spyware apps I have tried out).
Six Ways to Make Your NetBook More Like a Notebook
http://www.bnet.com/blog/businesstips/six-ways-to-make-your-netbook-more-like-a-notebook/2556
Software Tips and Tricks for your NetBook
http://www.brighthub.com/computing/hardware/articles/43662.aspx
