Windows XP starts up extemely slow. HELP!!

[spikey]

Hi, under the taskmgr.exe, there're explorer.exe, 3 x svchost.exe, etc.
Now taskmgr.exe goes down to about 50-60%, while explorer.exe,
csrss.exe and system idle process take up the rest.

My computer shows 504 MB of RAM(my RAM installed is 512 MB). Physical
memory shows: total 514480 ; available 420000+.

 

[Husky]

Start->Run->msconfig->Startup tab

See what's loading up at startup.

Spyware and Trojans don't normally broadcast their presence. But you might find
an odd entry there..

Do you have videowave 7 on your machine ? That can slow any machine down.
I just found out the HP PSC 1315 [printers] all-in-one can also slow you down.
I don't know if this is some sort of trend, but both these programs seem to
need to configure themselves or some sort of monitor settings when the machines
1st turned on.

What's your tray look like ? I have 11 icons showing. And not all programs show
an icon.

Speed of loading is related to how many programs it has to load.

If you do want to load faster, just set your startups on the General tab to
Selective startup and toggle the load startup items off. This may disable a lot
of useful programs though.
If you want to run anything disabled in the startups, you'll need access either
with a shortcut, or know where to find it in your all programs listing.

Then you have the problem that with your msconfig changed, it pops up a warning
at every boot until you restore things back to normal startup. Despite the
toggle box [don't show this warning again]. Never had any effect on showing the
warning for me. It always came up till changed back to normal startup.

Only option to remove those things and avoid that warning is to go directly
into the registry and delete their entries.

 

[Guest]

System Idle Process is what's not being used. All other process' seem normal
to me.

I've got 40 process' running with 1 gB of RAM - My System Idle Process is at
98 percent as I type this. Anything that stays up high for long is hurting
the performance of your system. I'd suggest multiple anti-virus and
anti-spyware scans along with an audit of what's on your system that's taking
up the cycles.