I have a number of comments, interspersed below.
I have an HP Pavilion t775UK PC that is about 4-5 years old and is now
taking an age to boot
Exactly how long is that "age"?
and I see the Windows splash screen 2/3 times.
I've cleared out as much as I dare using msconfig StartUp,
Exactly what did you get rid of using msconfig? What remains that you
did not clear out?
but I suspect the
problem lies elsewhere, perhaps a bloated registry,
Definitely not. The size of the registry affects neither your boot
time, nor performance in general.
not an area I like to
dabble in. I have defragged the disk and downloaded and installed all
updates over the years, but have never re-installed Windows XP which I
understand might help solve the problem.
No! Here's my standard post on that subject:
In my view, it's usually a mistake. With a modicum of care, it should
never be necessary to reinstall Windows (XP or any other version).
I've run Windows 3.0, 3.1, WFWG 3.11, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows
2000, Windows XP, and now Windows Vista, each for the period of time
before the next version came out, and each on two or more machines
here. I never reinstalled any of them, and I have never had anything
more than an occasional minor problem.
It's my belief that this mistaken notion stems from the technical
support people at many of the larger OEMs. Their solution to almost
any problem they don't quickly know the answer to is "reformat and
reinstall." That's the perfect solution for them. It gets you off the
phone quickly, it almost always works, and it doesn't require them to
do any real troubleshooting (a skill that most of them obviously don't
possess in any great degree).
But it leaves you with all the work and all the problems. You have to
restore all your data backups, you have to reinstall all your
programs, you have to reinstall all the Windows and application
updates, you have to locate and install all the needed drivers for
your system, you have to recustomize Windows and all your apps to work
the way you're comfortable with.
Besides all those things being time-consuming and troublesome, you may
have trouble with some of them: can you find all your application CDs?
Can you find all the needed installation codes? Do you have data
backups to restore? Do you even remember all the customizations and
tweaks you may have installed to make everything work the way you
like? Occasionally there are problems that are so difficult to solve
that Windows should be reinstalled cleanly. But they are few and far
between; reinstallation should not be a substitute for
troubleshooting; it should be a last resort, to be done only after all
other attempts at troubleshooting by a qualified person have failed.
And perhaps most important: if you reformat and reinstall without
finding out what caused your problem, you will very likely repeat the
behavior that caused it, and quickly find yourself back in exactly the
same situation.
I don't know how to do this and it
is another area I'm wary of. The PC has a partitioned drive which is
supposed to make doing this easy and safeguard my data, but I'm paranoid.
You mean you have your data on a second partition, rather than on the
same partition as Windows? There can sometimes be good reasons for
doing that, but if you are doing it with the thought that it
safeguards your data, you are almost certainly making a very serious
mistake. Doing that suggests that you do not do any backups, and it
leaves you susceptible to simultaneous loss of the original and backup
to many of the most common dangers: hard drive crashes, severe power
glitches, nearby lightning strikes, virus attacks, even theft of the
computer.
If your data is important to you, you need to protect it against all
dangers by backup to external media. Separating it in a partition by
itself is not real protection at all.
You can read my thoughts on both partitioning and backup in these two
articles I recently wrote:
http://www.computorcompanion.com/LPMArticle.asp?ID=326
http://www.computorcompanion.com/LPMArticle.asp?ID=314
What is the best way to go about improving boot times. As you may have
gathered this is not an area I am comfortable with, so I would like to start
with the simple steps, develop my understanding, then possibly move on to
the more complex/dangerous options.
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.
And one final point: what causes a slow startup is often malware
infection. You say in another message in this thread "I have Norton
Anti Virus which is kept up to date, so I don't think Trojans,
viri or malware are the issue. I've also got CCleaner, and Spybot
which I've run but it's still awfully slow to boot."
Several points here:
1. Norton Anti-Virus is the single worst security software available.
It provides some protection, but less than many other better choices.
2. Norton Anti-Virus is itself at least partly responsible for your
slow startup.
3. Norton Anti-Virus is an anti-virus program, and does nothing to
protect you against several other forms of malware, such as spyware.
4. CCleaner is generally a good program, but most of what it does
won't affect your startup time. One particular component of CCleaner
is not good, and should never be run; that's its registry cleaner.
Registry cleaning programs are *all* snake oil. Cleaning of the
registry isn't needed and is dangerous. Leave the registry alone and
don't use any registry cleaner. Despite what many people think, and
what vendors of registry cleaning software try to convince you of,
having unused registry entries doesn't really hurt you.
The risk of a serious problem caused by a registry cleaner erroneously
removing an entry you need is far greater than any potential benefit
it may have.
Read
http://www.edbott.com/weblog/archives/000643.html
5. Spybot Search & Destroy is an anti-spyware program, but not one of
the better ones. Moreover no single anti-virus program is perfect, and
it's wise to run two or more (but not at the same time).
So I recommend that you replace NAV with NOD32 if you are willing to
pay for a product, or Avast, if you want a free one.
For anti-spyware, I recommend that you download and run two free
programs: Malware Bytes Anti-Malware, and Super Anti-Spyware.
