Ray said:
My machine sometimes boots very slow but after a while picks up to
"normal". I don't sweat it and find that with patience it returns to
what I call normal - 2904 in and 304 out.
Are those download and upload speeds? Those are the speeds of your internet
connection, and have almost nothing to do with the speed of your computer.
That's the best it's ever
done and I am satisfied with it. A friend told me that if I cleared
all items in startup it would speed the boot time. I don't like the
sound of that. Is it a good idea?
No, it's a terrible idea. There *may* be some things that it would be to get
rid of, but getting of everything without first determining what it is and
what its value is is a prescription for trouble.
Here's my standard post on this subject:
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 want to address this anyway, it *may* be because of what
programs start automatically when you boot. On each program you don't want
to start automatically, check its Options to see if it has the choice not to
start. 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.
