I've got a couple of computers that take a while to boot. My husband insists it's because I change the wallpaper occationally. I say that where these are just jpgs or bmps and nothing animated or in other ways tricked out that it's more likely just too many programs/services wanting to load at boot up. I am I missing a possible culprit or is he grasping at straws?

Thanks inadvance for any advice

RP, when was the last time you cleaned your harddrive and did a defrag, those two things can really speed up computer performance.  If you don't defraf for example you have bits and pieces of windows whatever scattered all over the hard drive and the computer has a hard time collecting it all.  Jan

Also you may have a lot of stuff set to start up, such as flash and java updaters, MS Office, etc.   I use Spybot Search and Destroy to deal with that-if you put it in advanced mode, It will allow you to edit the startup options, and it has recomendations as to what actually needs to be started up and what can be disabled.  An excellent free tool-my only gripe is that the resident protection (it is primarally an anti-spyware app) can use a what I think is a  lot of memory, but that can be disabled.  It can be gotten here...

http://www.safer-networking.org/index2.html

W, forgot to mention that.  That's extremely valuable information which will put a computer boot up to its knees.  Great info. and I didn't know about the site.  Jan

You might also try Soluto. It will allow you to turn off some things at boot, delay some things, etc. It really does work to help make ur computer boot faster ;).

Laurie

http://www.blackviper.com/

A good site to determine which features are necessary and you can turn off.

Also, what are the integritiies of your hard drives?  How old are the drives?

I don't know if later OSs are affected but XP and earlier versions can be slowed down by having a lot of stuff on your desktop.  Large files or folders on there will make it slow to a crawl.

Judging by the replies, I guess msconfig is no longer accessible.  Pity, because that's a simple way to switch off a lot of rubbish.

Usual notes about clearing your browser cache, depending on the OS (May not speed up booting, but once you're online...;) Cleaning cookies can help, but you have to make sure you don't delete the needed ones (like the one for 'rosity). It won't hurt anything if you do, but you may have to log in again, etc.

Most of the other stuff has been covered. XP always took a while to boot, that was supposedly 'fixed' in Win 7.

I use AVG anti-virus, and have noticed that the latest version slows the boot-up process considerably. But it's worth the delay.

If you're using Norton or McAfee, you might consider ditching them and try Avast, Avira or AVG. All offer very good free versions.

Althouh as I've already mentioned, AVG is somewhat slow to load, it's still light years ahead of Norton or McAfee imho. And none of them hog system resources.

I have to agree Mogwa, I have been removing Norton and McAfee from friends PCs for the last three or four years.  Even on a high spec machine they have a major impact.

Start Task Manager just after startup and watch the processor climb to 100% and stay high for a very long time.   I use AVG on all my machines.

Windows 7 has a much faster start up than XP by the way

Thanks for the info. I've got 2 slow computers. One is an xp that's getting kinda old. And it has McAfee. (because it seemed prone to viruses when I was using Norton, Avast and AVG consecutively and I haven't found any since switching). The other is about 2 years old has xp, AVG. Neither has much on the desktop, just some shortcuts. I frequently run disk clean up and defrag. I’m sure it’s all the programs that start up. I don’t go through those often enough.

Thanks for the advice.  I take it, it’s not the backgrounds?

In the past I have had a hard drive slow down with age.  It gave no trouble but showed up when I was creating a video and the program I was using did a speed test and marked it as unsuitable.  Directed the program to another drive on the same system and it all went smoothly.  A rare occurance and unlikely to be the case in both your machines but my be worth checking.  There are a number of free test programs available.

I would take a look at Soluto. Cut my boot time in half (I have a lot of programs installed).

Laurie

4 free programs to make your PC happy.

CCleaner does exactly what it says : Cleans C and cleans registry (on demand).
Glary utilities Free= One click maintenance that works, and a lot of tools
Advanced System care free = one click maintenance and a lot of tools
WinUtilities free 2011 = also one clickc and a lot of tools.

These 4 freebies keep my 6 PC's from XP32 tot Win7 Pro happy and running nice.

Give them each a twist, once a week, and you"ll be good to go.

The first time they run, it will take some minutes, the next times are a lot faster.
As can be extected.

Let us know how goes. Tnx

PS; some of those free programs want to install Internet toolbars..
NEVER - EVER install those.....
They are nice, they are nice, but they all are PC garbage.

Those things can get any PC on its knees.

If you have some of these toolbars installed, as Bing, or Google, or Ask, or yoohaaa? 
Uninstall them, an throw them away as far as ya can.. And then go after them and throw them even further away.

Attention;
Your PC might kiss you for doing so.

Always keep in mind, that everything on you PC will cost time:
Or it gets loaded in memory, or it runs in the background, or it is just anoter file for your virus scanner to look at: each and every time.. it runs.

It is like cleaning the house, once a week :-)

Oh for the die hards?
Incredible mail :-)

If you ever installed that, Sorry, Throw PC away.

Once incedible mail has been installed, there is NO way to get rid of it......

Or install a fresh hard disk. :-)
Or be a crack in system restore. :-)

Always search the net for forums and or comments, BEFORE installing something that seems to geed to be true.
It usually is.

meanwhile in the real world, tech support continues.

Registries get bigger and cause boot-ups to take a bit longer over time.  http://www.pcmatic.com will tell you what is worth fixing or not on your system.  If you see names of apps that you are familiar with listed as problems, you have nothing to worry about and so you can just uninstall the diagnostic program after it reports what it finds.  Don't spend the money to clean your registry just to save a few seconds when booting up your PC.

Incredimail is fun to remove if you like manual registry editing.  There are others like Gater Games and Wild Tangent.