How To Make Your Computer Run Faster During Boot Up

Have you got dozens of icons you don't ever click on in the system tray? Is your computer sluggish? Do you have to go and make a cup of coffee when you turn on your computer because it takes too long? If you've been using your computer for a long time, you've probably installed programs you don't use any more.

Some of these start automatically when you log on, but they sit there, chewing up memory and CPU time, despite the fact that you've probably forgotten what they are! Most of them you probably installed a long time ago and forgot about. You might not even have realised you installed them if they were bundled with other software.

If you don't recognise the name, you probably won't miss it. It's not uncommon for some computers to have over a hundred of these processes.

So how do you get rid of them? Windows includes a tool called MSCONFIG that lets you enable and disable some start-up programs. You can open it by clicking Start, Run, typing in msconfig and clicking OK. Once it opens, click on the "Startup" tab. This doesn't list all start-up programs, but it does list most.

Another tool you can use is "autoruns", which is free from Microsoft. However, be careful - it's a powerful tool that can remove core Windows processes. If you're not sure what you're doing, ask someone, or search online for the process name in order to work out whether or not it's part of Windows.

The registry is a database of system and application settings that Windows maintains. Not all uninstallers do a good job of cleaning up the information they save in the registry, so it can quickly become full of useless information. This affects performance because every time Windows needs to access the registry, it then has to search through all the garbage that's been left behind in order to find what it needs.

I've seen computers where a quarter of the information in the registry was useless, old information. You can avoid this by using a tool like Your Uninstaller to remove old programs instead, but that only works if you haven't already uninstalled it. In most cases it's easier to use a registry fixer, such as Registry First Aid, which will also check the registry for errors and incorrect data which can also make Windows slower.

You also need to be aware of hard drive fragmentation. Data on your hard drive is all stored in chunks of the same size, with each chunk being saved in the first space on the disk available, then the next and so on. The more separate these chunks are, the more fragmented the drive is said to be.

If it's very fragmented, the hard drive's head has to jump all over the disk to read all the chunks of the file you're trying to load. It's much faster when all the chunks are together in a contiguous block.

Even if you yourself don't create a lot of files, Windows and your applications do. For example, when you're browsing the Internet, everything you view is downloaded and stored in a cache to speed up page loading times the next time you visit the same website.

Then there's system restore checkpoints, search indexes and much more, which adds up to a lot of background file activity. Fortunately, there's a tool built in to Windows to rearrange all your files into contiguous blocks (and if you're using Windows Vista or Windows 7, it'll do it automatically in the background). Open up My Computer, right-click on your hard drive, click Properties, Tools and then the "Defragment Now" button.