Doug said:
Have just purchased a Dell 3100 PC with XP Home, P4-3.0, and 1 gig
Ram. It takes 2.5 minutes till everything loads is this normal.
There is no "normal." How long it takes depends on several factors, mostly
what you have loading automatically. 2.5 minutes is slower than some
people's computers,but faster than others.
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 you do want to address it, you may want to stop some programs
from starting that way. 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 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.
