In
DonnaR said:
Hello, my computer is painfully slow on startup, here are my
specs, I
hope some of you can help me:
Windows XP (Home Edition)
Version 2002, SP2
Compaq Presario
Celeron CPU 2.40 GHz
248 MB RAM
I use Ad-aware and AVG. I also do a disk defragmenter once a
month,
as well as Disk Cleanup......... is it the Celeron? Is there
any
chance of speeding this old dog up, it takes 5 minutes to boot
up.
Thanks in advance!
My personal view is that the attention many people pay to how
long it takes to boot is unwarranted. Assuming that the
computer's speed is otherwise satisfactory, it may not be worth
worrying about. Most people start their computers once a day or
even less frequently. In the overall scheme of things, even a few
minutes to start up isn't very important. Personally I power on
my computer when I get up in the morning, then go get my coffee.
When I come back, it's done booting. I don't know how long it
took to boot and I don't care.
However, if your computer takes five minutes to boot, it's likely
that the culprit is whatever programs are starting automatically.
You might want to stop some of these.
On each program you don't want to start automatically, check its
Options to see if it has the choice not to start (make sure you
actually choose the option not to run it, not just a "don't show
icon" option). Many can easily and best be stopped that way. If
that doesn't work, run MSCONFIG from the Start | Run line, and on
the Startup tab, uncheck the programs you don't want to start
automatically.
However, if I were you, I wouldn't do this just for the purpose
of running the minimum number of programs. Despite what many
people tell you, you should be concerned, not with how *many* of
these programs you run, but *which*. Some of them can hurt
performance severely, but others have no effect on performance.
Don't just stop programs from running willy-nilly. What you
should do is determine what each program is, what its value is to
you, and what the cost in performance is of its running all the
time. You can get more information about these with at
http://castlecops.com/StartupList.html. If you can't find it
there, try google searches and ask about specifics here.
Once you have that information, you can make an intelligent
informed decision about what you want to keep and what you want
to get rid of.
