If your Windows computer takes a long time to boot up; longer than you’d like, that is, the reason may be that there are too many programs starting with Windows. A lot of programs that you install on your computer automatically decide to include themselves at Windows startup. Others may have an option to start with Windows which is already ticked by default, yet you didn’t really notice it on install.

There’s a way to check what is actually starting with Windows: -

Click Start>Run, type “msconfig” and press return. Click the startup tab and you’ll see a list of programs that start with Windows. To aid your box’s boot-up time a number of these can maybe be excluded from starting with Windows by removing the check from the box.

You’ll see in the illustration that there are many processes scheduled to run at startup. This is from my computer: Not all of the processes are absolutely essential in this case, but I choose to have them start with Windows, (XP in this case.) as my computer with its dual-core AMD processor and 2GBs RAM can handle it without a problem.

Older and less-capable computers may have difficulties in starting a large number of programs with Windows; causing the disk to thrash wildly, caused an insubstantial amount of RAM, combined with slow performance. This is caused by the single-core processor’s inability to cope properly with the workload put upon it. – Therefore the choice is to add more RAM; which’ll help, but the bottleneck is more than likely the single-core processor on this instance more than anything else: So therefore a multi-core processor would be the best option. Installing that would probably necessitate fitting a new motherboard, which would possibly require a new power supply unit too… But since the only issue is startup then it would be much easier and cheaper to lessen the load on the system resources at startup, rather than almost totally rebuild the machine.

Newer machines with multi-core processors and a decent amount of RAM shouldn’t have so much difficulty with startup, regardless of the number of programs starting with Windows: Nevertheless a performance increase in terms of boot time can be made by excluding a few programs from starting with Windows.

Windows isn’t selective about its startup routine; neither does it schedule consecutive programs to be started in sequence. Rather the startup is concurrent: Windows starts everything it’s been programmed to start at once; hence the large-system-resource-loading at boot. As I’ve already mentioned; if that’s too much for the amount of RAM fitted it uses the hard-drive as extra RAM, and in trying to access it as it would with RAM causes it to thrash-about wildly. At the same time the processor is working more than it usually does in processing the data from the numerous programs that it’s trying to start together. If you have enough RAM then the hard-disk is less affected: Generally I find that 2GB with XP Pro is sufficient for almost everything. With Vista I wouldn’t be so confident as Vista utilises all available resources at all times. How it does this is a bit of a mystery to me, as I see no point in its using resources that it doesn’t need at the time. – However I see Vista being remembered historically as the second ME.

Microsoft are quite manic in that way: They brought us excellent operating systems; XP in particular, and it seems like Windows 7 is going to be another one of their triumphs. ME and Vista, however, are among the worst operating systems ever produced in my opinion. Each of them promoted Mac and Linux better than Mac and Linux ever could; especially Vista. – Which almost toppled Microsoft off its perch.

Back to the issue at hand then; and when you’re excluding programs and processes from the bootup you’ll need to be able to recognise the essential Windows processes. If you prevent these from running you could get application hangs at boot, startup may fail altogether, or you might even get a BSOD leading to data and/or file-system corruption.

- So if you don’t know and can’t work out what a process or program is then ask. – No not me; I’m not a helpdesk: Ask Google; Google is your friend. Type the process name into Google and search for information on it. Doing so is beneficial in a number of ways: The main two being that you’ll get to learn what each process does as well as maybe a bit about how it works, as well as being able to spot and learn about any malware processes that have written themselves into your computer too.

On that note it might not be enough to simply uncheck a malware process’ startup like you would with a Windows process: If it can write itself into the startup list then you can bet your bottom dollar that it can also reset itself to start with Windows after you’ve disabled it in most cases. You’ll either need to use a program to exterminate it totally, or delete all corresponding registry entries for its processes.

- And though I’ve said it a million times I’ll say it again: Unless you know exactly what you’re doing; editing the registry can lead to massive data loss and even to your computer being unable to boot in some cases. It is not advisable to edit the registry unless you are very well read up with Windows. Even I hesitate or simply don’t do it at all most of the time.

Anyway; once you have unchecked entries that you know you don’t need to start with Windows, have closed msconfig after saving changes, and restarted your computer, you should notice an improvement in boot-time. It may not be a dramatic improvement, but every little helps.

Have you any comments? Perhaps you have experience(s) with this, or maybe you know something not mentioned herein? The comment-box is below: You know the routine…