How To Take Care Of Slow Boot Up Times
You reach the pinnacle of frustration when your computer takes ages to boot. You feel like taking it and throwing it from the terrace of the highest building in your locality. Relax.
There are some simple tips, which, if followed, can resolve the problem of slow boot up easily.
Why does your Computer have Slow Boot Up?
There can be numerous reasons for a slow boot up. Some of them are as follows:
- There can be some access problem in the hard disk. Maybe the HDD has been dropped accidentally, or maybe the motor has got damaged. Either way, the data requested by the operating system will take longer to load.
- There may be too many programs in the start up which are causing the system to slow down.
- You need to check the memory for bit errors.
Tips To Avoid Slow Boot Up
- Almost all the programs that you install in your computer, offers to add an icon to your desktop. Starting from programs like Realplayer, AIM, Yahoo, Norton, Webshots and various others puts a small icon that unnecessarily starts the program every time the system boots up. This results in slowing down the whole process of boot up. You need to deactivate these programs from the start menu if you are interested in speeding up the booting process. Keep only the necessary items in the Start menu and remove the rest.
- A very common reason behind a slow boot up is a cluttered desktop. Keep your desktop clean and neatly arranged. Remove all unnecessary icons and shortcut buttons. The more shortcuts you have, the slower is your machine. Every time you load your machine, Windows has to find the icon corresponding to each shortcut and loads it, thus, contributing generously in slowing down the whole process.
- Antivirus programs are unnecessary boot up items. You can leave it on your taskbar, but ensure that it does not check your system every time you need to boot up unless you download too many things from the net. This will speed up your boot up process to a large extent.
- You can utilize the task manager WinNT and higher versions to scrutinize the services running and also check the event log in the administrative tools to find out which services have failed or which are causing any problem. Not only failed services but also misconfigured ones are responsible for booting problems.
- You can also enable the "Quick Boot" option to speed up the whole process. Many PCs have a particular BIOS setting, usually called "Quick Boot" or "Quick Power On Self Test" that have the power to make the boot take less time. This option causes the BIOS to skip some of the usual test routines that it executes at the time of booting and in turn speeds up the boot process. The flip side is enabling this setting turns off some of the power-on tests that the BIOS usually performs, which might just increase the probability of a hardware problem not being noticed at the time of booting.
- Another option is disabling the Floppy Drive See. Majority of the PCs have a BIOS setting to immobilize floppy drive seeking, which is the concise access the BIOS makes to the floppy disk just before it boots the system. Disabling the seek option goes a long way in speeding up the booting process by a couple of seconds. This usually does not have any harmful effect on the system. However, if you are facing any problems with your floppy drive you might just want to re-enable the seek option as this makes troubleshooting of certain problems easier.
