Registry Clean and Repair

Windows has long been notorious for taking a while to load. When XP came out (or rather when 2000 came out) this problem was solved somewhat. Bootup can now take place in as little as 30 seconds or less if you know how to speed up Windows startup.

But that experience is shortlived as soon as you start to use your PC and install new programs. Therein lies the problem.

Resident Programs

The huge corporate entities that make today’s software realise that they can gain some massive branding advantage from putting an icon in your taskbar. This is why I hate Apple Quicktime with a vengance. Despite most people rarely needing to use this software (it’s needed to view .mov files), it has a nasty habit of always installing itself to the taskbar.

Over a short period, you’ll find that every time you switch your PC on that you have maybe 20 to 30 programs all trying to start up at the same time. No wonder you can’t do anything for up to as much as 5 minutes!

Kill Them One By One

The best way to get rid of these (and you can still reverse your changes) and speed up Windows startup is to use a nifty little utility that comes with Windows called msconfig. Just go to Start, Run and then type in “msconfig”.

There are a few items here but the ones you want to check out are on the “Startup” tab. Here you can deselect all the stuff you never even heard of. Actually, it is best to just type the process name into Google to find out what each of these things do. Most are not needed but some may be essential sub-programs for main programs that you normally use.

Memory Allocation

What you can also do even before the above step is to run task manager (press Ctrl-Alt-Del) after startup to see which programs are taking up the most CPU and/or memory. This can help you to decide which processes to deselect first in msconfig.

More Tips

You can get more tips on faster PC operation from articles on our site here: XP Performance Tuning, Boost Windows Performance, How Do I Make My Laptop Faster?, Windows XP Performance Tweaks.