Slow Boot-Up? - Here are some Tips
Sep 28 '00
I just spent 2 hours over to a friend’s house just going through his PC because he was having major slowdown problems with it.
He owns an AMD K6/2 450mhz and yet it was taking forever to boot up and taking way to long when you tried to go into folders. His PC was taking over 3 minutes to go from power up to having windows completely loaded. Even on Win98 SE that is way to slow for a computer the speed of his to be running.
I thought I would write up a brief (maybe) on how to keep your PC running at tiptop speed. This review is for people who know there way around a PC and know about dragging and dropping and how to properly delete and if necessary undelete files. As always if you are not sure back it up. Just move (or rename) the file to a new location and move it back if something happens you don’t like.
A.
Practically every program you install nowadays wants to add a icon to your taskbar. That’s the bar in the lower right hand corner that has the time and maybe a speaker icon in it.
Programs like, Realplayer, AIM, Yahoo Pager, Norton’s Utilities, etc. etc. etc. want to put in a little icon that starts the program up every time windows boots up. My bud had 8 programs starting up when windows did; this caused windows to have to start up each program each time he booted.
You do not need Realplayer starting up with windows or really anything else for that matter. All this does is slow everything down. You should go into each program and turn off the option for “Start This program with Windows” or something to that effect. Also go to…
Start Button > Programs > Start Up
And see what is in it. Some things you may need like Office Tool Bar, or Maybe an Antivirus Program (See Note “C”), but things like Yahoo Pager or AIM or System Monitors are not really needed. You can delete the things in here pretty safely. On Windows 98 just drag each icon out of the menu and onto your desktop and then re-boot. If something doesn’t start that you need then just drag the icons back into the folder.
Once you have cleaned out the taskbar to only necessities lets move on to the next thing that my bud had that was slowing him down.
B.
The first thing I noticed when I booted up his machine was that he had at least 50 icons on his desktop. He had shortcuts to practically every program and game he owns. This will slow a person down a lot!! Every time you boot up Windows has to go out and find the icon (picture) for each shortcut and load it. The more you have the longer it takes.
Everything you install puts itself into your start menu and that is the easiest place to go and click things. It may be simpler to click on it right from your desktop, but it does hurt the speed. Get rid of all the shortcuts on your desktop and just use the ones on the Start Menu. Of course one or two shortcuts doesn’t really hurt anything just don’t go nuts, remember “Everything in Moderation”.
C.
Antivirus Programs are another somewhat non-essential boot-up item. I do believe you should leave it in your taskbar, but you shouldn’t have it checking your system every time you boot up. Unless you do a lot of downloading on the net or swapping discs with people that there is no need for the AV program to scan your drive EVERYTIME you boot up. This could take up to 4 minutes off your boot-up time just by stopping this function.
Simply go into your AV programs options menu and find the option for scanning at boot-up and take it off. Of course if you are paranoid then don’t do this step, but I have been using the net longer than most people (back in the BBS days) and I have only had one virus in that entire time. Even nowadays I do a lot of downloading, but only from respectable sites so I am not all that worried. I have Norton’s AV running on my taskbar, but I don’t have it scan my drive every time I boot-up.
Conclusion
When I was done my buds PC booted up in less than 2 minutes, which saved him 2 minutes of sitting around. I talked to him about cleaning up his PC and getting rid of programs he never uses anymore. Of course there are more things you can do, but I don’t want to get into anything that could have adverse effects on your PC so I stuck to the simple things.
One program System Mechanic is a great program to have. It cleans out registry files for stuff that is no longer valid, cleans out temp files and duplicate files, and tons more. You can get a shareware program at places like www.download.com or www.tucows.com for free.
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