Windows XP Slow Startup Problems.

You have a PC with a windows xp slow startup problem. At first your spanking new Desktop PC or laptop was running like a dream. Fast as lightning. Then as time progressed things started to happen. It takes a while to startup when you switch on. Occasionally things just seem to go at a crawl. Hah, Lets try one of those amazing fixit programs advertised. Shell out bucks and she’ll be OK. Humm…. That will fix the slow startup windows xp problems. Things seem to be a little bit better. What about that program that says you have a registry problem. That will fix it. Well believe it or not they may fix a lot of problems but they may not be the one you have got. They most probably not be what a lot of people have got.

I will tell you something about new PC’s and laptops. They have something in them that is mechanical.
Yes a hard drive. They are these days a sophisticated item but they are still mechanical.

My first PC was made by Wang. My first laptop was made by Wang. (I have still got it. Probably a collector’s item now). Some people may remember Wang. They were one of the original Word processing systems companies. Way before MS Word and they were good. (At the time) Well, they produced a PC. It had a 10 megabyte disk drive and I thought that was BIG. Yes it was mechanical and yes today’s disks are still mechanical. Now we consider gigabyte disk drives small.

Eventually disk drives will disappear as static (means it does move anything but bits) ram (for the un-initiated “random access memory”) becomes so cheap that this will do away with them.

In the meantime you have your mechanical disk drive.

Well to get these “bits”, in which a number of them make up your file, a mechanical head has to move over a recorded surface. Occasionally it may pick a bit up wrong. That’s OK the manufacturers knew this would happen so put in things called “checksums” that can up to a certain amount actually figure out what was missing and replace it. Good, that’s fine.

What about those it can’t? Well hard luck you have a corrupted file! The only way to fix that is to restore it from somewhere. But that is another subject. The main thing is that if this is some sort of system file it may cause some problems and slow down your PC until it either sorts itself out or gives up. (WOW a system crash) That makes a system really slow (like stopped).

Back to your slow system.

Let me explain the manufacture of hard disks. One thing the manufacturers know is that the disks they manufacture will have defects on the surfaces of them. They produce millions of them. Do they chuck away the ones with defects? No! Each one goes through a test. As they are tested and a defective part of the disk is found they use a bit of smarts and make that bit of disk unavailable. If the number of defective parts go over a certain number then they reject the disk.

It may be that you have a labeled 80gbyte disk. But in actual fact you may have only a 79.9999 gigabyte disk. What the heck, what’s a few bits between friends.

Unfortunately, sorry I had to say that word. Parts of the disk surface may become defective afterwards. You may not know it until months (or even a year) after you have bought your state of the art PC or laptop.

Why?

Well when you first got your PC you may only have used 6 or 7 gigabytes of your 80 gigabyte disk. Over the months or year you put on all your good stuff, (photo’s, games and such) Your disk gradually uses 30 gigabytes. (Got lots of photos you know) Then bingo one photo is written across the defective part.

One thing about windows xp is that it goes checking all the time around the used portion of the disk. It hits the defective part and hey hold on have a look at this again, and again, and again as it tries to recover the file. Eventually if it can’t it times out. Wow your system springs back to life again. Now if this happens to a system file it may take longer. Your system may not crash but it will take longer checking it out.

This can manifest (yes, I know some posh words) in a slow startup when you first switch on. This is because windows does a lot of checking at this time. Unfortunately windows keeps a lot of this stuff to itself.

That’s what these purveyors of good stuff to fix everything up for you depend on.

Now I have got all the crap out of the way I had better tell you what you should do first before forking anything out. (money that is)

This is pertaining to windows xp but most of it is also relevant to other windows OS’s

The first thing is checking that damn disk for bad spots and corrupted files.

Perform the following:

1. On your start menu (bottom left corner) place your mouse pointer and click the right mouse button.
2. Place your mouse pointer on “explore” and click the right mouse button.
3. You should now have a screen showing your file structure.
4. Place your mouse over the part that probable says “Local Disk (C)
(Whatever it is called it should have the (C)

5. Left click and it should highlight. Right click the mouse while it is selected.

6. You should get another menu. Right at the bottom you will see “properties”. Left click it.

7. You should get a box that shows a pretty circle with blue and pink segments in it. (If you have more pink than blue then you are in a good state space wise on your disk. If you have only a small sliver of pink then you are in some other trouble. Send me a comment if you want)

8. At the top of the box there is a menu. Click “Tools” with your left mouse button.

9. You should come up with another box. In it there should be a selection “Check Now”. Left click it.

10. In the box that appears tick both of the “check disk” options with your left mouse buttons and then click “start”

11. You should then come up with a message with a load of waffle. Just click “yes”

12. Your system will now restart and start doing good things. You can what if you want. You may or not see some errors coming up. It may say restoring, it may say deleting things but just let it ramble on.

13. What it will do is make unavailable bad parts, it may be able to restore some parts from a special segment of disk.

14. Eventually it will restart. This may take a while depending on the size of the disk so it is best to schedule it when you do not want to use it.

Now your windows xp slow startup may have improved may even be fixed. There are other factors that affect windows xp slow startup which I cover in other articles in this blog.

If after doing all the things that are recommended (and don’t cost you anything) then maybe you should look at the registry file as this can be a prime source of Windows XP slowing down.

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I was listening to the radio while I was working and heard something about windows xp slow startup. This made me stop and listen. It was a radio show that was talking about PC’s and windows in general no real techo stuff. What I heard next astounded me.

They were talking about a bit of software that you could buy that allowed you to access websites while windows was starting up. The software came about because some peoples computers took so long to start up with windows that this software made them more productive. Time was not wasted while they waited for windows to finish starting up.

I was flabbergasted. They did not state how long these PC’s took to startup windows but they must be taking a long time to make this software worthwhile specially seeing that they mentioned that it cost $50 – $60 a year to subscribe.

Windows xp slow down is considered if a PC takes more than a minute or two to startup windows xp. If it takes as long as to make windows xp slow enough to warrant a program to make up for lost time then there is something drastically wrong with one’s computer.

I can tell you, to check and fix your windows xp slow startup problem would cost you a sight less than $60 (and this is only one time).

But first consider how old your PC is. Is it getting a bit long in the tooth. Windows has grown in size and complexity over the years, even more so over the last couple. Older PC’s just cannot manage the overheads now being imposed by the windows operating system and the application programs now being developed.

If your PC is over 4 – 5 years old think about replacing the box. They are a lot cheaper these days and you will get at least 10 times the power from the most modest PC Box you can buy today costing 200 – 300 bucks. You don’t need to buy all the other stuff you already have.

Anyway there are real things you can do to alleviate your windows xp slow startup problem and believe me if you have a start up problem then you also have a problem with windows running slow when your PC has finally finished starting up.

There are a lot of things you can do like cleaning up your disk, how to defrag your hard drive, fixing up your windows xp registry file and a host of other things. My blog “Windows XP Slow Startup” will show you just what you can do yourself to speed up your PC.

Unfortunately you may have to pay something to fix your problem but if you have to buy a piece of software to enable you to circumnavigate your windows xp slow problem then you are just fooling yourself. You have a problem, fix it, do not just work around it and wear it.

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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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File cleanup is an important part of fixing your windows xp slow startup problem. It can be significant cause of slowing down your PC even once windows xp is up and running.

We have fixed up errors on the drive and hopefully your startup is at least a bit faster. What else is there?

What also happens over time is that a lot of crud gets left on the hard drive. This crud can be temporary files, files that you have deleted and reside in the recycle bin and logfiles that in some cases can grow very big.

Now how do we get this crud on our disk? Well I have just mentioned one, deleted files that go to the recycle bin. Sometimes these files could be gigabytes in size. (Remember that video you deleted last week?)

Crud can be left when a program terminates because something has gone wrong.

One of the biggest is because naughty you do not close down your PC properly. Remember you were typing that large document. You finished and instead of closing word down and shutting down windows properly you just hit that power off button!

Naughty, naughty, naughty.

When you start using a program (MS word for example) It generates temporary files. When you are writing a document your word document is actually written to the temporary file. When you click on “save document” it saves from this temporary file down to your real document file on disk. More temporary files are generated when you change things. (You have probably noticed that you can undo things you have typed) Very clever. Temporary files are kept of your original document several times back that enables you to go back and undo (or redo) things.

Finished! , Hit the power off button. Now if you had closed MS word down and shut down windows properly all these temp files would have been neatly cleaned up and deleted.

Heck, I’ve just hit the power off button. MS word and windows have not had the time to do this I have just chopped them off at the neck.

When you switch on your PC again windows no longer knows about these temp files because all the pointers to them have gone so there they stay.

You continue being naughty, your disk gradually gets more and more crud you may even end up with more crud than good stuff eventually, especially if you are a heavy user of MS Word. You can get some big and lots of temp files there.

Well let’s give a bit of help. Start with yourself, whenever you finish close down any programs you are using and close down windows properly. (You know, click start bottom left corner then click “Turn off Computer”)

Lets get rid of that stuff in the recycle bin.

There are three ways of doing this, easy, harder and easier.

Let’s start with “easy”. If you have a “recycle bin” icon on your desktop perform the following.

1. Left “double click” on it.
2. A window should open that shows in the right pane all your files and documents in the recycle bin.
3. In the left pane at top left you will find “empty the recycle bin ”left click” on it.
4. All the files and documents will disappear.

And that’s it, simple isn’t it.

Now if you do not have a “recycle” icon on your desktop, (sometimes happens) you will have to do it harder.

1. Go into your file Manager. (what’s “file manager”)
File manager allows you to manage your files and documents (copy, delete etc. But of course you knew this.)
2. “Right” click on “start” in the bottom left corner of your desktop.
3. “Left” click on “explorer” (this is not Internet explorer. Microsoft called it this jut to confuse you)
4. You will get a window that shows you all your folders in the left pane and all your files in the right pane.
5. In the left pane scroll down to the bottom until you see “recycle bin”
6. “Left” click on it and you will see all the files showing in the right panel.
7. “Right” click on the “recycle” bin folder and then click on “empty recycle bin”
8. Voila! All gone.

Now before I go to the “easier” way I though I should mention some thing about all those “temporary” files. There is an easy way and a hard way of getting rid of them.

I am not going to tell you the hard way because you may delete things you shouldn’t.

Now for the easier way of deleting things in the “recycle” bin (why didn’t I tell you this first? – I wanted to put you through a few hoops)

The easier way gets rid of stuff in the recycle bin and all those temporary files as well. All you have to do is down load a program from here http://www.filehippo.com/download_ccleaner and install it. (It’s free) All you have to do then is run it and click the icon and then “run cleaner” and it will get rid of all those files in your recycle bin as well as all those “orphaned” temporary files plus a few other things as well.

All you have to do is to remember to maybe run this program about once a month and you will be OK.

Just one useful suggestion, if you are deleting large files (such as video files which may be gigabytes in size) It may be useful to stop them going to the recycle bin. As long as you are sure you do not want to recover them you can stop them going by:

In file manager normally you would just press the ”delete” key. If instead if you hold the shift key down and then pressed the “delete” key this will delete it and also stop it going to the “recycle” bin.

Now it is hopeful that your windows xp slow startup problem has been fix a bit more. Please see my next post as there is something else you can do that may improve it even further.

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