Hi,

So i want my pc to boot faster. i got 1 gig of RAM, but it still is kind of slow cause i got a lot of processes starting up. How can i tell my pc wich processes he has to start when he boots and wich not? and wich processes should i set to start, so i don't get any problems starting up, cause of some critical processes not starting up?

thx in advance

Then get rid of some processes?
If you have anything from Norton, then remove that.
Same goes for anything else that is resource hungry.

You can choose which services start at, Control Panel -> Administrative Tools - Services.
Be careful though.

Start -> Run... -> msconfig
There you can select what startup too.

This program works very well as a startup manager. Here is a link with a review and brief instructions, which you can also find on the main site.

ok, thx, I'll try it out!

If you disable Services at Startup it's best to only change one at a time so you can easily see if there are problems. If you change several it can be hard to see which one is causing an issue because many Services depend on other Services to run so stopping one can cause others not to work right.

If you think there's an issue you can look in Event Viewer and it will sometimes have additional information about what's going on.

This is a good topic. not meaning to hijack or anything, but i have 768 ram, and a 2 gb processor. 28 services load and run at start up. my computer is clean as a whistle for spyware and virus', but i have a REALLY slow start up. im really not sure why. so i just dont turn off the computer for the most part. any suggestions other than disabling services and checking for spyware?

Great article on Start-up/Boot Times

Your hard drive does come into it too you know ....
If you have a slow hd then writing to it will take time (relatively speaking in computer terms)
When you boot up, quite a lot of memory is used. When that runs out, the only thing left is your swap-file (page file ? i dunno) Either way, it will get used.

So if u have small memory & slow hard drive, then you've had it for slow boot-up before you start.
On a modern system, 768Mg won't take long in be used up on the intial boot.
It usually should get freed later.

Defragmenting hard drive is first step on improving boot-times. Default Windows Defragmenter works well, though you may want to take a look at commercial defragmenters like Diskeeper 2007 or PerfectDisk from Raxco.

For removing services: don't alter anything you don't understand. Some services which are "recommended" to be disabled may be needed on your system. Allways think twice before disabling any of the services.

I personally recommend TweakGuides Tweaking Companion as for general system optimizing, but use this guide at common sense, because some of these tweaks can mess up your system, regardless of what writer says about how secure is alter some of these settings.

There is also program called "Microsoft BootVis", which is listed in TGTC guide. It can improve boot times even dramatically (as happened to my older computer), but Microsoft doesn't support it anymore or give it at Downloads- section, because it may in fact do something which produces programs instability, errors or even blue screen. Errors produce mainly on Hyper-Threading processors, so check out if your processor is HT- enabled before applying this kind of things.

When you tweak your system, allways use common sense. If you don't know what something means or what is does, leave it alone!

I recently tried out a bunch of defraggers and the only one I found to be any better than Windows own defrag was DirMS.

Perhaps try TuneXP which has a pretty good 'Fast booting (re-arrange boot files)' function. It noticeably speeded up the boot time on my PC.

Autoruns

Another great program for editing start-up entries.