Windows XP Slow Startup | slow shutdown windows xp

Now what else can we look at that causes a windows xp slow startup ? Ever heard of “windows xp resident programs“? Well these aren’t nasties and some are actually required to be resident. First, what does a resident program mean?You know that thing the salesman kept telling you about. Huge amount of RAM. (Random access memory) More you have the better it is. (Well not always) What these resident programs do is eat up this RAM. So you may have started with 500megabytes, but may end up with just a 100MB after all these programs are loaded. Once they are loaded into memory they are stuck there. Perform this little operation.

1. On your keyboard press cntl and hold it down then press alt and while holding both down press the (del)ete key. (Go on I dare you).
   
2. You should get a window appearing called “Windows Task Manger” (there that was painless wasn’t it)
   
3. Select the “performance” tab.
   
4. Now at the bottom you will see an item called “Physical Memory” It will give your total memory, how much is available and how much is used for system cache. I bet you will not see much left.
   
5. What you should do is reboot your PC and before you start any programs have a look again. This still may not be true as your system will probable have been set to start some of your programs automatically. Maybe you should close these and try again.

What determines if a program should be memory resident? Well windows xp for one. He (or should I call it a she) requires some that are mandatory to be resident. Others he loads because it may be better for them to be there but not mandatory. The biggest culprits of all are those great software programs you keep installing. Especially all the free ones. A lot of them mark certain parts to be resident. Why? Makes it a bit quicker to load for a start. Remember that program you use once a week. Great to be able to load it half a second faster when you do. For this you have a resident program sitting in memory for a whole week doing nothing just waiting for you to use it’s main program and save you half a second. Wow! That’s a saving.

Now comes the difficult part, how to identify what resident programs need not be in memory. Well that partly up to you. If you want all that jazzy stuff floating around but you are irked by the windows xp slow startup, get a more powerful PC. Even then it may not help. Why? Well, remember back in my first post for the window xp slow startup problem. We talked about hard disks. Well these are the slowest thing in your PC. Well not quite, your floppy is, your cdrom is slower, but you are not dependent on these for startup.

How do these resident programs get into memory? Would you believe they are loaded off your hard disk and inserted into memory? The more resident programs you have the longer it takes. This coupled with all those programs you want automatically start, help a lot to create a slow startup.

Back to identifying resident programs that do not need to be in memory. This is hard so I have started developing a list of window xp resident programs list here , so keep checking.

I have a little job for you but before you do it there are a couple of other things you should do before altering any system configuration.

One you should save your registry and two you should set a system restore point.

Why? Because if a catastrophe happens (not likely if you just follow what I say) you can always get your system back. (your system should be set up to take a system restore point periodically anyway)

Saving the registry. (what’s the registry) The registry holds all the information about your current configuration, information about all the programs you have loaded and so on. It’s sort of like a library index. (so do not mess about with it) (Unless you know what you are doing) If the library losses its index of books it makes it damn hard to find a book.

Follow this procedure:

1. Click on “start” then select “run” then type in “regedit”
   
2. A window will come up labelled “Registry Editor”
   
3. Left click on “file” then “export”
   
4. In the window that appears type in a file name (one that you will remember ) then press “save”
   
5. After the save, exit the editor.

To perform a system restore point follow this procedure:

1. Click on “start” then “programs” then “accessories” then “system tools” then “System Restore”
   
2. In the window that appears click on the “create a restore point” button then click “next”.
   
3. In the next window, type in a description. This can be anything.
   
4. Click on “create”
   
5. After the restorepoint has been created close the window.

Didn’t know that you were going learn how to do something else did you.

Now lets get back to what I really wanted you to do.

Perform the following actions:

1. Left click on the “start” button, bottom right of your screen and select “run”.
   
2. In the box that appears type in “msconfig” then click OK.
   
3. A window will appear called “System Configuration Utility” (Don’t mess around with it unless you know what you are doing)
   
4. Select the “startup” tab.
   
5. Voila! A list of the programs that are loaded at startup appears.
   
6. Have a careful look at this list and try and identify any of your programs that you feel needn’t be loaded at startup. (If you do not know what something does leave it alone)
   
7. Disable any programs (e.g. maybe you do not want office toolbar to load at startup) by clicking in the “startup Item” box (Don’t worry if funny things happen you can always go back and enable it again)
   
8. Click on “Apply” then “OK”
   
9. The system will then ask you if you want to restart. Do what you want at this time as none of the altered settings will be applied until you restart.

Now if anything funny happens after reboot you can repeat the above and re-enable the program.

If for some unknown reason a catastrophe does happen go to the windows xp system restore page to find what you need to do to get your system back again.

I hope this article has been useful for you. At least as an understanding how a something else may be causing your windows xp slow startup problem.

Wilf Gerrard-Staton

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Windows popups are another source that causes windows xp slow startup because some of these programs that cause them are loaded at startup. This causes a lack of memory. Why? Because your physical memoryis eaten up every time a new program has to be loaded this then causes one of those in memory to be swapped out to disk. Hard disks are slower than memory especially on laptops. This is more so when starting up windows XP. The start-up process has to load all those programs you have decided to load at start-up into memory, a decision has to be made whether a portion of them has to be retained permanently in memory. If this is the case then this reduces the memory you have to load the others and as more and more get their bit retained in memory start-up gets slower and slower.

So why are you loading these programs at start-up? especially if they are causing that annoying windows popup. Do you use Skype, windows messenger, MSN messenger or any other social types of programs?

I called on a mate the other day and he said good you dropped in my PC takes for ever to start-up can you have a quick look at it. I switched it on and he said you may as well come into the kitchen and have a cup of tea, as it will take about 10 minutes to boot up.

Well after my cup of tea I went and had a look. To start he had Skype and MSN messenger starting up as well as some other things. First thing I asked him was how often do you use Skype and how often do you use MSN messenger. He said, Skype a couple of times a week and messenger maybe once a day.

I then looked at his memory and saw that he only had 256mbytes installed. Not a lot these days and I said to him maybe a bit more memory would be handy. Anyway I said I could improve your start-up time immensely. Why do you need to start Skype or messenger at startup when you use it so infrequently? Even if you use it frequently I would not load it at start-up especially messenger which seems to take an inordinate amount of time loading anyway.

Well to cut this short I removed these from start-up and the improvement was astounding. It then only took his PC only 90 seconds to start-up.

Now why is this? Well, during start-up the processor is constantly fighting to run programs simultaneously and is constantly trying to grab memory resources. So it’s a big fight.

The solution to this is to stop all those programs loading at start-up. All you need is an icon on your desktop so you can start them when you need to use them. After you have used them close them which will return the memory for other programs to use. Way to go man. Why do you need those programs running taking up permanent memory when you only use them a couple of times a day.

So what do we do to remove these programs from being started up? Just follow these instructions.

To stop Skype just click on “tools” then “options”. In the left box your will see a line that says “Start Skype when I start windows”. Un-tick the box next to it.

Now that irksome thing called messenger. Microsoft likes to confuse the heck out of people. There are actually two types of messenger. There is “Windows Messenger” and there is “MSN Messenger”. To confuse you further they are now calling “MSN Messenger” “Windows Live Messenger”. A further confusion if you see the icon that looks like two people in your tray at the bottom of the screen and you place your mouse pointer on it will pop up a text window that says “Windows Messenger” This is actually “MSN Messenger”.

The actual “Windows Messenger” is a backdoor method that allows Microsoft to send you unsolicited messages. Unfortunately it is also a backdoor security risk and spammers found it. So first lets turn this off you do not need it. This is how you do it.

Windows XP Home and XP Professional

1. Click Start-> Settings -> Control Panel
2. Click Administrative Tools
3. Click Services shortcut
4. Scroll down and highlight Messenger
5. Right-click the highlighted line and choose Properties
6. Click the STOP button
7. Select Disable in the Start-up Type scroll bar
8. Click OK

Now that’s out of the way lets concentrate on MSN Messenger.

There are two ways to stop MSN Messenger loading at start-up, one is by stopping it using Outlook Express if you use it and the other by modifying the “Windows Registry” which is a bit more technical. Stopping it from loading at start-up with Outlook Express does not stop it completely it only stops it from running in the background which is initiated during start-up. When you start Outlook express it then load MSN Messenger and stops it when you exit Outlook Express.

First it is recommended that you save the “Windows Registry” first. Just follow these instructions.

1. Click Start-> Run-> Type in “regedit”
2. In the widow that appears right click on “My Computer” then “export”
3. In the next window type in a file name. (make sure the filename type is .reg)
4. Click “save”
5. Exit from the “registry” window

To stop messenger running automatically using Outlook Express follow these instructions.

1. Start up “Outlook Express”
2. Click Tool > Windows Messenger > Options
3. In the window that comes up select the “preferences” tag
4. Under this tag un-tick everything in the “General” part.
5. Click OK and exit Outlook Express

You will notice that the “Messenger” icon will disappear from your tray. If you reload Outlook Express then it will re-appear.

Now for the tricky one. If you are unable to do the above then the “registry” has to be modified.

These instructions on disabling MSN Messenger contain information about modifying the registry. Before you modify the registry, make sure to back it up and make sure that you understand how to restore the registry if a problem occurs.

1. To Disable Messenger MSN from running go to the start menu and select RUN. In the window that appears type regedit.

2. The Registry editor window will now have opened. Navigate to the following Key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft.

Create a new key under “Microsoft” by selecting Edit from the main menu, select “New” then “Key”.

Name this new Key: “Messenger”.

3. Select the newly created “Messenger” Key and under it create another new Key. And name it “Client” It should look like this:

4. Right click on the new “Client” Key and select “New” then “DWORD value”.

Name the DWORD “PreventRun”.

5. Right click on the “PreventRun” Dword and select “modify”. Enter a value of “1” (one) then click OK.

6. Restart Windows XP and you will have successfully disabled MSN Messenger completely.

If you ever need to use messenger in the future just change the “PreventRun” value to “0” (zero).

Have fun and few less windows popups as well..

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