Want more performance and power for your N900 and give it a go at competing against today’s hardware? I’ve decided to put up a small collection of patches and tweaks that could greatly improve the performance of your N900 here.

Note: The guide assumes you know what you’re doing, as some of the tweaks might cause damage to your system, so use those at your own risk. Also, some of the packages to be installed require Extras-devel to be enabled, read on how to enable it here if you can’t find the package. Disable it right after you’ve done everything!

The tweaks work independently, so they’re all optional, but it’ll be wise to get through them all!

1. Battery and Speed Patch

Both speed the N900 up and conserve battery life, so install them, follow our guide here.

2. Turn on Hardware Acceleration

HW Accel makes your Hildon desktop much smoother. To activate it, go root:

sudo gainroot

and run this sed command:

sed -i ‘s/WSEGL_UseHWSync=0/WSEGL_UseHWSync=1/’ /etc/powervr.d/hildon-desktop.ini

HW Accel can cause some random crashes or reboots for some people. If you’re one of them, do the same steps, but switch 0 and 1 in the sed command.

3. Swappolube and Tracker-Cfg

Swappolube uses many tweaks to improve performance and low-memory mode for the tracker also conserves battery.
To install Swappolube:
sudo gainroot

apt-get install swappolube

Launch it, hit “Proposed”, “Apply”, “Store” in order to use the optimal settings.

To install tracker-cfg:

sudo gainroot

apt-get install tracker-cfg

Launch it and set it to low memory mode.

4. Kernel Power and Busybox-power

Kernel-power is a highly recommended package to have, as it adds many useful features to the kernel. To install it:

sudo gainroot

apt-get install kernel-power-flasher

and then reboot.

Busybox-power adds in a huge load of utilities to your Busybox shell. To install it:

sudo gainroot

apt-get install busybox-power

5. Community SSU

The Community SSU adds in a lot of UI improvements, full portrait support and much, much more! If you still don’t have it, go over here for instructions.

6. Task-swapper

A nifty package called task-swapper will save you time between window transitions. With it installed, switching between apps is as easy as pressing Ctrl-Right or Ctrl-Left.

Install it with:

sudo gainroot

apt-get install task-swapper

7. Catorise Plus

Catorise Plus puts all your apps into nice configurable directories, so you don’t have to go searching them all over the menu. To install Catorise Plus:

sudo gainroot

apt-get install catoriseplus

After installing all these, you should have a much better performance than what you had before!

If you know any more Tweaks, feel free to mention them and I’ll add them to this article.

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