The last Wizard I played was extremely effective, but I chose a path just for that purpose.
Point Blank Shot and Precise Shot at 1st level (Human). This allowed me to be effective with my Light Crossbow in melee. I also needed those feats for later because I fully intended to make use of Ray spells.
Heck, at 3rd level I very nearly killed a Giant Wasp all on my own with just the crossbow, because I hit twice in two rounds and crit'd once, while the entire rest of my party managed a serious miss fest and did only 3hp to the creature.
Scrolls. I managed my memorized spells more like a Combat Sorcerer and placed everything else, primarily utilitarian spells, on scrolls. At 3rd-5th level I generally had 15-20 spells on scrolls at any given time. Not to just lob around on a whim, because we weren't getting enough gold to be throwing it away like that, nor did we have the time for that much scribing. But it really helped when the chips were down.
That being said, my GM was at least nice enough to allow me to scribe more than one spell per day. I think it was pretty close to my entire low level complement of spells per day, as long as it was one scroll and they were all the same caster level. A lot of GMs won't do that and unfortunately, a lot of campaigns are so time crunched that you are never given the time for scribing scrolls.