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What Prompts Agonizingly Slow Windows Startup

My computer has pretty fast windows startup, around 60-70 seconds most of the time. Sure that is not newsworthy but a lot of my friends (the ones who won’t follow my advice) tell me that their pc’s take as long as five minutes to start. To me that seems crazy, but I know it happens more often than microsoft wants to admit. What triggers the computer to take so long starting up and what can you do to fix it? These are two good questions and the answers are actually pretty straight forward.

Firstly, what causes the computer to boot so slow? There are quite a few things that add to the problem. Each one of them individualy contributes a little bit more overhead to the process, so fixing just one of the offenders will help a tiny bit and each subsequent issue addressed helps a bit more. The primary cause of slow startup times are startup programs, windows prefetch, temporary files, clogged registry, hard drive fragmentation, low memory, and malware. I will talk about each of these areas in turn.

Startup programs are simply what the name says, programs that are configured to start every time you start your PC. Most of these are not required and certainly not desirable. You can find excellent free tools to find and stop these programs fairly easily. A preffered tool of mine is the startup tool in CCLeaner. Google it and download, it will help.

Lack of memory is another regular problem. A lot of the computers you purchase these days do not come pre-installed with the highest amount of memory they can run. Do some research on your computer to find out how much you presently have installed and how much your computer can handle. Then go purchase what you need to bring it up to max. This is one of the less expensive things you can do and yet it gives some of the most impressive performance gains.

Temporary files, this one makes me laugh because windows keeps your temporary files around forever if you dont get rid of them yourself. Those look more like permanent files to me. A simple solution here though is to use a tool you already downloaded, CCleaner. The default function of this tool is to clean temporary files off your computer.

A clogged registry can seriously slow your computer down. The registry though is a very important piece of your operating system and changes here should be undertaken with great caution. You can buy or download free registry cleaners, but I would leave registry alterations to trained proffessionals.

Hard drive fragmentation is very common and is a chief contributer to lengthy boot times. Download and install Smart Defrag. A very good free utility.

Malware, which includes all vaireties of malicious software from Spyware to Viruses and everything in between, are another major cause of lengthy boot times.

Windows prefetch is a folder that stores files pertaining to your settings of most programs. Over time these files grow to be obsolete and filled with worthless and erronious information. You should remove the contents of this folder if you have a slow windows startup problem. This is an simple manual process.