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.
- 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).
- You should get a window appearing called “Windows Task Manger” (there that was painless wasn’t it)
- Select the “performance” tab.
- 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.
- 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:
- Click on “start” then select “run” then type in “regedit”
- A window will come up labelled “Registry Editor”
- Left click on “file” then “export”
- In the window that appears type in a file name (one that you will remember ) then press “save”
- After the save, exit the editor.
To perform a system restore point follow this procedure:
- Click on “start” then “programs” then “accessories” then “system tools” then “System Restore”
- In the window that appears click on the “create a restore point” button then click “next”.
- In the next window, type in a description. This can be anything.
- Click on “create”
- 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:
- Left click on the “start” button, bottom right of your screen and select “run”.
- In the box that appears type in “msconfig” then click OK.
- A window will appear called “System Configuration Utility” (Don’t mess around with it unless you know what you are doing)
- Select the “startup” tab.
- Voila! A list of the programs that are loaded at startup appears.
- 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)
- 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)
- Click on “Apply” then “OK”
- 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