There are some days where you computer just won’t startup as fast as you want it to. Well, not all is lost, there are plenty of ways that you can speed up your startup times in Windows XP. Doing these tips do not guarantee lightning fast bootups in 3 seconds or less, but they’ll help you enough that you’ll notice the difference and enjoy the increased speed.

• MSConfig - Go to Start->Run->Type msconfig. The System Configuration Utility window will popup. From here click on the Startup tab and uncheck any unneeded program listed in the box (If you don’t know what a certain program does due to the sometimes weird names just do a google search for the exe and you should find out what the program does). This prevents the unchecked programs from loading up when you start Windows, allowing you to access faster boot speeds and less waiting for it to load.
• BIOS Settings - Different settings in your motherboard’s BIOS can limit or speed up boot times. You can typically access the BIOS by pressing Delete on startup, and if that doesn’t work, there’s usually a message that tells you what key to press to go into the BIOS setup mode. Look around in the boot options for a boot order, or a list of components that BIOS should boot from first, and in that list make sure that your hard drive is the first, this speeds up boot times by having your motherboard look for all it’s information in the hard drive first, rather than checking your floppy drive, network and CD drive. Also check to see if there is a quick boot option in your BIOS as well. This can speed up Windows XP startup by skipping some of the tests done when your computer first boots up.




• Defrag - Defragmenting your machine not only speeds up the bootup, but it increases file and application performance, because it organizes physically where the files are on your hard drive so you computer access them faster. You can run the Windows Defrag utility by going to your Start menu->All Program->Accessories->System Tools->Disk Defragmenter. A good rule of thumb is to run Defrag every two weeks, if you hardly ever run it, or this is your first time it may take awhile to complete, but after that it should run fairly fast.




• Delete unused fonts - To help Windows compatibility with different languages, old legacy software and hardware support, Windows XP comes preloaded with plenty of fonts that you’re most likely never going to use. Some may have some weird purpose to them like Wingdings (though I have no idea what that purpose is for, and if you find out please email me so I can be in the loop), or others that only have a good purpose if you speak Taiwanese with a Russian accent. Now, first, be careful when deleting Windows fonts, because some of them may mess up your system if they are removed, I personally have never experienced any problems, but if the font is legible, and not completely random or blocks of squares, you shouldn’t delete it. If you want to play it safe, first make sure you move the fonts to a different folder to see if that causes any system instability, then after everything checks out okay, feel free to delete them. You can access your fonts folder by going to the Control Panel and then clicking on Fonts, if you have the classic control panel, or click on Appearance and Themes and then click on the Fonts folder on the left hand side.

So there you have it, a few quick and easy tips that will shave some valuable seconds off your startup time.

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