Booting is the process which takes place once you switch on your personal computer. Depending on your hardware specification and various other factors like age of your PC, amount of software you have installed it may take quite a sometime to boot. Here are the few steps which will result in significant improvement in speed of your PC booting.
Windows XP booting
- Use all processors for booting-
1. Make sure you are logged in as ‘Administrator’ account.
2. Open start menu ( or hit windows button) type msconfig
3. The system configuration window opens, click boot tab.
4. Goto advanced options now boot advanced options window will pop up.
5. Check number of processors and set it to maximum number. By default windows will take only single processor to boot, which means your PC’s entire computing power is not used!
6. Press OK and apply.
- Disable unwanted start up programs-
This is one of the main culprit for slow booting. Too many application starting along with windows increases the booting time. You can safely disable them so that they won’t start during boot time! This doesn’t affect a program’s functionality in any way.
1.After above step 6 in the same window, you can see startup tab, click that.
2. Now keep only essential programs and disable the rest! Programs to keep, for example- Antivirus, Security softwares, touchpad drivers etc. Click apply.
- Defragment your Hard Disk Drive(HDD)-
Over a period of time as you start filling your HDD, the filesystem arranges your data in a random fashion resulting in slow access of stored data due to fragmentation. This fragmentation causes applications to run slowly and even startup time becomes longer. So to avoid you have to regularly defragment your HDD (say once in a week). There is built in app in windows to defragment ( under accessories>system tools) but you can find many freewares for defragmentation. Personally I’d recommend Auslogics Disk Defrag as it can optimize the file arrangement in disks after defragmenting. It is FREE for personal use. It also has a portable version.
These steps speed up your booting thus reducing the startup time significantly! To know how to speed up the computer overall, see our post- How To Speed Up the Computer- Make Your PC to Run Faster
If you have any questions do leave a comment!
