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As we already said it in our last article a vast majority of our customers are complaining about slow start-ups and shut downs of Operating Systems (OS) – in our case Windows XP.
If we stop and think for a while we’ll find just a couple of logical explanations for this outcome, before enumerating them let’s make one thing clear:
WINDOWS NEEDS AROUND 30 TO 50 SECONDS TO START AND ABOUT JUST THE SAME TO SHUT DOWN – WE ARE TALKING ABOUT AN AVERAGE CONFIGURATION HERE.
So let’s make a small list of things that are possibly slowing our virtual life:
Applications that are starting together with windows
A heavy on resources Antivirus/spyware or firewall
A conflict between hardware components
No recent Defragmentation
Viruses, spyware, Backdoors etc
Low Hard Disk space on the C drive or wherever disk windows is installed on
Not enough virtual memory
Corrupt Windows system files or registry
On battery laptops
Nine items to worry about, I guess it’s not that bad. Let’s talk about the first one in this short article.
Applications that are starting together with windows
We placed this cause first as we believe it’s very common or part of the common over all problem. Actually we had a client not long ago that could not start working on his computer because windows was trying to launch a third party application that was corrupted.
These applications are a necessity we cannot deny that but do they have to start when windows starts? NO, and to prove we are right let’s make a list of such applications:
Adobe PDF detector
Skype
MSN
iTunes Helper
iTunes Support
Real Player
DVD Check
Yahoo Messenger
Qttask aka Quick Time
HP Image Ready
etc...
This are just some of the usual suspects, other applications are installed when you add a printer, video camera or camera. Let’s take the camera application as an example.
Are we downloading all the time pictures from our camera? NO, so the solution would be to stop the camera application from starting when windows starts and only access it when we really need to work with our pictures using the usual routine START- ALL PROGRAMS- CAMERA APPLICATION. This way I guarantee a faster windows.
How do we stop applications from starting when windows starts?
Simple, go to START choose RUN type in MSCONFIG than in the dialog box choose STARTUP tab here you will see a list of all applications that start when windows starts.
Identify the ones you do not use and disable them. CAREFUL not to disable the ones that windows needs for starting up (better leave the ones that you do not recognize alone).
You will be asked to restart after the restart you will see a dialog box saying that window startup applications were modify, check the don’t show this again box and click OK, restart and you are done.
This is it for the part one of this tutorial.
Enjoy a faster Windows from
Your best PC Repair shop in Brussels |
