How To Make Windows Boot Faster   by Trevor Johnson

You know the story. You need to do something on your computer but it's not switched on. Ouch. You're probably in for a long wait whilst Windows gets everything in order. So just how do you make windows boot faster?

Short of holding a gun to the head of someone in Seattle, there are things you can do to speed up things, at least a bit.

Part of the trouble is that Windows is now such a big operating system that it needs to go through lots of things before it can safely start up. Sure, it's been through these things tens or hundreds of times before on your computer. But at the end of the day, it's just being cautious. You might have changed something whilst its back was turned - added a new piece of hardware, installed some software that really, really needs to start up every time Windows starts. That kind of thing.

Start by checking what starts up whenever Windows starts.

You can do this by running a program called Msconfig: in XP, select Start, Run, type msconfig, and press Enter. In Vista, select Start, type msconfig into the Search box, and press Enter.

The Startup tab will tell you what runs every time you boot up your machine.

If there are programs there that don't need to be there, you can stop them from running the next time you switch your computer on. Just be careful to make sure that you don't disable anything critical. If necessary, copy the command line from Msconfig and see what the program actually does as the startup item name doesn't always mean much.

Whatever you do, set a System Restore point before you mess about with your startup programs. Then if things don't go to plan you can use the Windows restore option to get your computer back to how it was before.