“What nourishes me also destroys me.”

The Latin version of the phrase is famously gracing Angelina Jolie’s belly, but it’s increasingly becoming a fact of life for many Firefox users.

The problem isn’t Firefox, so much as its enticing array of easily-added extensions. The recent Grand Prize winner of the Extend Firefox competition, Reveal, is a case in point.

Michael Wu’s Reveal allows those who juggle a lot of tabs to see thumbnails of the tabbed webpages by simply hitting [F2]. To navigate to the correct page, simply start typing a keyword into its search box. You’ll soon be staring at only the thumbnails that match your keyword. Clicking on a thumbnail activates the window.

Very cool, but making all those thumbnails takes a toll on performance, as in combined CPU, memory, and hard disk throughput. As Wu admits:

The time it takes to make them quickly adds up when you’re trying to take thumbnails of all tabs. It appears that many “Tab Expose” type extensions suffer from this problem.

While there are many tricks you can use to mitigate the performance losses, sooner or later you’ll crash into hardware limits… literally.

This is especially true of laptops, where cramped, heat-prone spaces combine with modest power supplies to make upgrading problematic.

That’s why Email Battles decided to try hotrodding a modest laptop to achieve better performance. Our experience will work for many upgrades, including desktops. The patient: An Averatec 3225, sporting a Mobile AMD Athlon XP-M (LV) 2000+ processor, 512MB of PC2700 RAM, and a 40GB, 4200RPM hard drive.

The laptop was suffering under a Firefox load of 18 extensions and an average of 30 open tabs, 24×7. In fact, it was the inspiration and guinea pig for our earlier article, Seven Ways To Solve Firefox Memory Headaches.

While those tricks made the thing far more usable, it still spent most of its day with Committed Memory at 80%, while Disk Time and Processor Time often topped-out at 100% for long periods.

Realizing that any improvements in CPU, memory or hard disk would create more heat in an already tight cabinet, we proceeded carefully. As our primary focus was Firefox, we decided to change only those items that had the potential to significantly enhance its performance: memory and storage speed.

After replacing the 512MB memory stick with 1GB, we ran the system for a few days. Committed Memory dropped by half, while the disk and processor spent less time at 100%. Overall, the laptop “felt” more stable, which was nice… but not thrilling.

Next, we installed a new 60GB, 7200RPM hard drive. After cloning the old 4200RPM drive with Symantec’s Ghost program, we revved it up and… wow.

That tired, old laptop bogged down with heaven-knows-what software runs like a spankin-new-off-the-shelf system!

Committed Memory plateaus at 39%, Disk Time averages less than 1%. And while you can still get the processor to max out by reloading all tabs at once, it spends most of its working time around 26%.

To help prevent excessive heat buildup, we applied four half-inch thick stick-on bumpers to the bottom of the laptop case. This allows considerably more cooling airflow. (We picked ours up at Lowe’s, but every hardware store has them.)

While it’s true that the stick-on feet look a little geeky… the laptop isn’t complaining… And neither is Firefox. As for the ultimate arbiter of whether or not a laptop is overtaxed… The AC adapter/transformer remains nearly cool as a cucumber.

If you’re more anal about aesthetics and engineering, more scientific laptop coolers can be had from the likes of Antec and Vantec. We didn’t see enough benefit to offset the added bulk.

The total cost for hardware, including bumpers, 220 bucks, is a joke… Especially when you add the time and trouble that you’d otherwise incur moving all your special programs to a brand new machine. Can’t stand the thought.

Email Battles Backgrounder: