Robin said:
My computer takes a long time to start up and shut down.
How long is " a long time"?
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.
I know that
there are many things running in the back round that are not needed.
When I used windows 98 I would go to start, run, type in "msconfig"
and then I had a list of what was needed to run windows. I would turn
off anything else listed there that was not needed to run windows.
Can anyone give me a list of what is needed for Windows XP?
*Nothing* i sneeded for Windows XP. th eonly things necessarly are those
*you* find necessary. Ouside of the obvious need for security programs like
your firewall, anti-virvus, and antispyware programs, the rest are up to
you.
However if you do want to address the slow startup, it *may* (or may not;
there are other possibilities) 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 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.