When it Takes Forever to Boot Up - How to Speed Up My PC With Little Effort

Do you use every single application that's installed on your machine immediately upon login? If you're the typical user, you open programs on an as-needed basis. It is obvious that the more programs you have open at once, the bigger the impact on your PC performance, and the greater potential for things to start coming to a crawl or even freezing.

A lot of programs, like Adobe Acrobat, Reader, and the Microsoft Office suites, will start their services immediately upon login, which forces you to wait. Of course, that's the last thing you want to do when you first log in to your PC.

When it comes to startup slowness or quickly figuring out how to speed up my PC, a handy tool I like to use is MSCONFIG, which is more formerly known as the System Configuration Utility. This tool has a tab that shows all of the programs that load upon startup. It also gives you the ability to select or deselect programs that you don't want to automatically start. Here's how you open the tool:

Windows 7/Windows Vista

  • Go to Start. In the Search box, type "msconfig" and hit Enter. In the System Configuration Utility window, click on the "Startup" tab. Check or uncheck programs as you see fit.

Windows XP

  • Go to Start. Click on Run... Type in "msconfig" and hit Enter. In the System Configuration Utility window, click on the "Startup" tab. Check or uncheck programs as necessary.

As a general rule, I only uncheck items that start with "C:Program Files..." in the second column. If it has something similar to "C:WINDOWSsystem32..." then it's probably an important system file that needs to run on startup. I would leave those and your firewall and antivirus programs checked.

After you make your changes, you'll have to reboot at some point for your changes to take effect. When you do, you'll notice that the programs you unchecked aren't running at startup and your wait time to start using your PC was significantly decreased. If you have a lot of programs and they don't need to be loaded after logging in, you can save a ton of time using this easy fix!

One more thing! If you found this to be a fairly easy, painless task, there are many more methods on how to speed PC up with little effort. Just go to http://www.squidoo.com/how-to-speed-my-pc-up

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jerry_Bair

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