Tuning A Cheap MS Windows Laptop for Flutter App Development
get a faster laptop without very much money.
Starting out in developing Flutter apps you will not have an expensive laptop. This is an easy way to without spending major cash to get at least 25% faster in flutter app development by speeding up your heap laptop.
Trim Installed Fonts
You do not need 500 to 1000 fonts on your laptop or desktop OS installed as that results in slow loading of apps, printing, etc as those fonts are re-loaded each time.
Browser Tuning
The major source of memory use no matter which browser you are using is the extra memory process it takes when ads run on webpages. Install an ad blocker such as ad-blocker-plus.
Hardware and Software Tuning Your Cheap Laptop
On MS-Windows, the Ready-Boost OS feature to use a USB flash drive for ram limits us to 4 times the physical ram. So you need to buy only a cheap 64gig USB flash drive. Note, buy two as this will get used up quickly in about 24months due to the excessive read-writes you are subjecting it to.
You are going to format the USB flash drive to use the NTFS storage format. Once that is done right-click on the drive to see that ready-boost tab:
You will select the middle option to use the dedicate the device to ready-Boost and notice that MS-Windows has automatically calculated and set the maximum space to reserve for system speed on the USB flash drive.
Hit apply and ok and then you will see one extra item listed in the left pane of file explorer and that is your USB flash drive acting as a virtual ram drive.
Results
This hack speeds everything up so that on a typical 4-year-old 8gig ram laptop you will get a speedy launch of the Android emulator in 90 seconds. And a typical flutter app build happens in 120–460 seconds.
And you can typically launch two sessions of VSCode with one for notes and one for building the app and both are not slow at all and respond fast to user operations.
About Fred Grott
I’m the crazy SOB who as a former android mobile developer is starting to write about flutter mobile app development, design, and life(see Eff COVID and GOP https://fredgrott.medium.com/eff-covid-and-the-gop-e912db0548b8). Will I reach the pivotal One Million Medium monthly viewers mark? Sit back and watch it happen. Find me on these social platforms:
https://www.xing.com/profile/Fred_Grott/cv
https://www.linkedin.com/in/fredgrottstartupfluttermobileappdesigner/