Cleaning Old notebook

I recentely got a new asus custom built notebook with windows vista 64-bit, for use in my autocad classes. I was first wondering what ways i could keep this new notebook running at peak performance(it has turbo memory). Second my older notebook(2 years old) a compaq has windows XP and i would like to destroy everything on the hard drive and only run a torrent downloader, itunes, and lots of music and movies. I was wondering if there is an easy way to do this.

 

Ok, I'm slow, I didn't understand what you meant by peak performance. (You can set Vista to max performance profile)

You want to destroy everything and re-install XP ?
Eraser and DBan bury the data, or you can delete all partitions with GParted, make a new partition, and then reinstall XP.

 

Consult with BlackViper's website for optimizing Vista by deactivating many of it's services.
Reduce the amount of programs that boot-up at start-up (but only ones you really don't need to start with the OS itself ... leaving antivirus/sound card drivers/firewall to load is ok).

Remove any excess programs that came with your asus custom built notebook and are not essential for notebook use (apart from the drivers for inbuilt camera for example).

Defragment both the boot sectors and the entire hard drive/ run CCleaner as well.

As for your XP machine ... if you have multiple partitions on the hdd, you can easily wipe their contents via format upon re-installation of Windows (my recommendation would be to re-use your XP for this as it's the best option for the task ... OR, you can even try to go with Linux for torrents, itunes, and music/movies instead of XP).