There is probably nothing more annoying than a pc that takes longer than a geriatric cow poke to boot up. Waiting for your PC to go through the motions can be especially annoying if you just have one little task to do, like check your e-mail and you need to wait ten to twenty minutes in order to get it done.  Let us take a look as to why the start up process is so slow and what we can to about it.

The icon army

If you take a quick look to at the bottom right panel of your screen and see a giant army of icons assembled, indicating that you have over a dozen processes running at once, this is probably why your computer takes all day long just to boot up. A lot of the processes that you choose to download, such as messenger applications like Yahoo and MSN  will automatically embed themselves into your startup tray unless you are tech savvy enough to keep them from doing so. Having all these applications open upon start up is akin to trying to speed to work during rush hour traffic. Your computer’s processing power and memory becomes bogged down as all these processes vie for attention.

Boot out to boot up

In order to get your PC’s boot up time back to something reasonablelike a minute or two, you might want to get rid of a few unnecessary processes in your start up tray. There are several ways that you can do this.

If you are feeling like a pro you can click on the Start menu, go to Run and then type in: msconfig.exe. This will take you to Window’s system configuration menu. Now click on the Startup tab and check out all the programs that began running when you turn your computer on. Getting rid of the ones that you do not need can be a little tricky and if you have any  doubt about a program, leave it alone until you know some more about it. There are lists availble on the Internet that will let you know what processes are absolutely necessary, and which one are not.

A slightly easier way to do it

If you do not feel like going through lists of processes and are afraid of playing doctor with your computer, I did find a slighlty easier way to get rid of some start up processes and make my computer faster. RegCure, the registry fixer, actually has an option that lets you decide which uneccesary programs you want to remove from start up, taking all the guess work out of what to get rid of.

Tags: slow boot up, slow pc, start up problems