Tiny said:
Hi, I need help. my comp takes far to long to start up. everything
seems to start up at the same time and I don't know how to limit
these startup items. when xp starts, it then takes about 5 mins
before i can use comp. Help
Allthough five minutes is on the long side, 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.
If you do want to address it, it may be because of what [rograms stsrta
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 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.