HP Touchpad Performance Hacking Guide

In our previous guide: Root Hacking the HP Touchpad Tablet PC, Benchmark Reviews showed you how to enable Developer Mode on the HP Touchpad, and, with the new capabilities this mode enables, to download and install the Preware applications manager. In this installment, we'll show you how to dramatically improve the performance of your Touchpad by disabling excessive logging functions and overclocking its dual-core processor.

Excessive Logging

Most computers maintain log files, which are records of operations they've performed and errors they've encountered. Reviewing log files can help isolate the causes of a problem. Developers must decide how much information to log: too little, and you might miss useful information; too much, and you slow the system down and fill its storage with log data.

HP seems to have erred on the side of "too much" with the Touchpad, which logs just about everything. Perhaps this was to help HP track down WebOS and application bugs in a new platform, but there's so much logging going on that it has a noticeable effect on the Touchpad's performance. In fact, there are so many logging features we'll need to do this in three parts. Let's start with the simplest one first. For this step we don't need any extra software.

Step 1: Open the Phone and Video Calls application.

Step 2: Touch the Dial Pad icon at the upper left of the screen. When the dial pad appears, type ##LOGS# (##5647#) and click the Dial button.

(Note: If you can't get to the dial pad, it's because you don't have any voice over IP accounts configured. The easiest solution is to create a Skype account-- you don't have to use it, just create it.)

Step 3: When the logging level screen appears, click the Set Logging to Minimal button and then click the confirmation at the bottom of the screen.

OK, that's the first part. But there's still some logging going on, and we'll need to download some utility software to deal with it. To do that, we'll use the Preware application we installed in the first article.

Step 1: Run Preware. Select Available Packages, then Linux Applications, then Utilities.

Step 2: In the list of utilities, select EOM Overlord Monitoring.

Step 3: Install the package by tapping the Install button at the bottom of the screen. It's interesting to note that the stock tablet will upload rather a lot of data that you might not want uploaded!

For the last part, we'll use Preware to install two system patches that will disable the last logging items.

Step 1: Run Preware.

Step 2: Touch Available Packages, then Patch, then System. Select Muffle System Logging, and tap the Install button. This will disable all system-level logging except for errors. Tap Later when asked if you want to restart the system.

Step 3: Tap the Back arrow button at the top left of the screen, then tap the Misc selection. Select Remove Dropped Packet Logging, and tap Install. At this point you can go ahead and restart the system. When it's finished restarting, you can run Preware again and select Installed Packages, then Patch. You should see these two patches in the list:

At this point we've disabled or at least "turned down" the excessive logging in the system. This in itself is enough to speed things up noticeably, but we're not finished yet. Let's overclock that Touchpad!

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