Does your PC suffer from slow startup?
Do you sit in front of your PC screen gazing at the hour glass icon that's been displaying on your monitor for five minutes or more? You need to check your electronic mail prior to going to the office, but your computer is taking an eternity to boot. You keep asking yourself in disgust, "How come my computer takes so long to boot up?"
Knowing why this happens will allow you to easily prevent delays and make booting up as easy as waking yourself up with that morning cup of coffee. Despite your hard drive size, RAM, or what have you, there's normally only one main problem that causes your computer to experience slow startup.
Your Startup Folder Is Crowded
Whenever you install a new program, its programmers like to pretend it's really important. So they set it up in your startup folder which makes it run whenever your computer boots. When you have several of these programs competing with each other all at one time, Windows becomes so over-burdened with this software and the associated settings, that it responds in a super slow manner.
In order to remedy this, click on your Start Menu, select Run and type in msconfig. This will start up the System Utility Configuration. Choose the "Start-up" tab and deselect any programs that aren't absolutely needed when you boot your system.
This action will greatly enhance your startup speed since your computer will not be fighting to get multiple programs started before the desktop screen appears.
WARNING! If you're uncertain about a particular program, then leave it alone. It's better to have a slow booting computer than it is to spend hours troubleshooting one of your important applications and possibly losing critical data.
Having said that, it's usually not that much of a problem but it always pays to be careful when playing with your computer's settings. Discretion is called for in these matters.
Get Rid Of Dead Wood Programs
Once you've trimmed your startup folder, you can try deleting old programs that you don't use anymore. Go to your Control Panel and select Add/Remove Programs. Your program list will load and you will see an uninstall button next to each listing. Click the button next to the program and this will start the uninstall procedure.
If you have a lot of programs like I do, your list can be slow to load. CCleaner, a free utility, has a feature that gives you fast access to the Add/Remove listings.
Getting rid of unused programs can reclaim hundreds of megabytes of disk space and remove their associated settings from the system registry.
Defragment Your Hard Disk
Finally, once you've done the previous steps, run a Disk Defragmenter to put all of the data that naturally gets spread out over time back together.
Computers store bits of data randomly and this adds up over time so that your disk heads, need to search hard to find all the pieces of your program when it loads it. A defrag, will make all the data line up in neat, organized rows so that the drive heads have a lot less seeking to do and your computer speeds up again.
To do this right click on My Computer, Properties, Tools, Defragment.
Restart your system and you should notice a dramatic change in boot up speed.
Still Having Problems?
If you're tearing your hair out after completing the preceding steps and are still 
experiencing slow startup or erratic behavior, then you should consider that you might have a virus on your PC. You need to take things a step further and run a virus scan on your computer to make sure that there are no malicious files present.
The fact is that there are programs that make this process extremely easy for you and do a thorough job if you're willing to spend a little bit of money for them.
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