Hi, I (probably foolishly) built myself a computer recently, running Windows
XP Professional 64bit (serious buyers remorse). At least it has not exploded
or melted, so I must have done something right... But, it starts up very
slowly - 50 secs. It will do its normal start up thing for a few seconds,
then stop for about 20 secs, then start again, stop and finish. Also, the
motherboard screen always pops up first. Quick start is enabled on the
motherboard.
Any ideas? Thanks so much for any input!
50 seconds plus a few seconds, then 20 seconds, plus a little more?
That sounds like the total is under two minutes. I think you are
concerned about a completely non-existent problem. Two minutes isn't
long at all.
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, it may be because of what
programs start automatically, and you may want to stop some of them
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 with google searches and asking 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.
