You've done this all before. And got the t-shirt. You have to do something right now on your PC but the screen is blank, meaning it's turned off. You growl. You're in for a long wait whilst Windows decides what it needs to do to get your computer to run. If you didn't know better, you'd think it had never done this before.
Just how do you make your computer boot faster?
It seems like the older your PC is, the more time it takes for it to boot up and start running. You begin to think that Microsoft has shares in your energy company as they appear to want you to leave your computer running 24 hours a day.
The good news is that there are a few things you can do to speed up the time it takes your computer to boot up.
Windows checks anything that automatically runs as soon as you start your computer.Naturally that includes the version of Windows you're running. Plus all the other software that absolutely must run on your system. Windows Messenger. iTunes for your music. Your anti-virus software. Maybe a spyware checker. Skype so you can make cheap phone calls. Anything and everything you might need. In case anything's changed since you closed your PC, Windows will go off and check all these programs that run when it starts up.
It is possible to discover what these programs are. But you should be careful - whilst you may not recognize a program by name, that doesn't mean you can safely remove it. Some of the services that run behind the scenes have quite obscure names that don't mean anything to you. But removing them, you'll be in trouble. The rule with startup programs should be if you're in doubt, leave it running. It's not worth shaving off a few seconds on boot up only to have a PC that refuses to work at all. So it's probably worth leaving this to your friendly techie.
The next thing you can do is clean up the Windows registry. This is the part of Windows that holds all sorts of information about your computer. Most of it is necessary. Trouble is, every time you remove or delete a program it can leave debris in the registry. Over time, this will mean your computer slows down while it checks all this out of date stuff. Lots of PC problems have been traced to this old information laying around.
The easiest way to clean the registry is to run a special piece of software called (surprisingly enough) a registry checker. This will scan through the Windows registry, looking for errors, inconsistencies and out of date information. After the scan, you'll get a simple report and if you're happy to let it, the software will trot off and fix the reported errors. This is simple, quick and effective. Personally, I let Error Sweeper run every night to find and fix registry errors.
If you'd like to know more about speeding up your Windows system, click here.
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