Windows XP boasts of less than 30 seconds boot up time, according to Microsoft. That’s a good deal – imagine, your computer has the capacity to boot up that fast - except that this is only possible for very new computers or newly installed OS and rarely happens for computers that are already one year old or older. For many of them, slow Windows XP startup is a daily affair.

Slow Windows XP startup is a symptom that something is terribly wrong with your computer. Many odd things can happen in your computer, from the day it was born to the present day, and all these could show as slower start up. Like the average computer, yours could have suffered plenty of changes, from deletion of old files to addition of newer ones. All these can combine and eventually cause significant delays in your start up and slow down your machine’s performance. So what are the identifiable cause?

Plenty of applications that run simultaneously during startup.

Your computer accumulates programs overtime, many of which are launched during start up. If there are a lot of individual things that need to be initialized by your pc during startup, it is not unlikely that it will slow down to a crawl.

To check if this is your pc’s problem, check the list that shows up when your hit START, click RUN and type the MSCONFIG command in the search bar. This should give you direct access to the long list of programs that run as you boot up. Some of the programs in this list are integral in the smooth functioning of your pc, don’t change any of their settings. Others, game patches for example, are not very important. These, you can delete or disable. A word of advice in disabling programs: Uncheck only those programs that you are familiar with, otherwise leave them unchanged.

Filled up registry.

The computer’s internal registry is what many can call the ‘brain’ of the computer. It keeps track of all the activities of the pc – the web searches, the changes made on the settings and the status of the hard drives. Eventually, this registry fills up and congests. The problem is, Windows does nothing to fix the computer’s registry automatically or remove files that are unnecessary.

As is expected of anything that continuously collects information, the registry gets bloated with files, leading to numerous errors that affect the speed of startup of your pc. Fortunately, there are programs designed to clean the registry for you. Editing the registry comes with a cost though – risks for your pc and monetary cost for you. It is not a perfect science and you may do these at your own risk. When done right, however, your startup time will significantly improve after cleaning the registry.

Too many background applications.

Most manufactures and creators of software configure these to have components that run in the background. This allows their programs to be ready for loading all the time but slows your machine down in the process. But these programs are not the only ones that can bog your pc down. If any type of malware is present, it could affect your pc’s performance and slow Windows XP startup may occur.

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