I am surprised by how many people have unneeded fonts on their computer. It really slows it down at startup. The font like symbol, most people will never use. All you really need are like 20 fonts. If ya have a lot of them, it slows down your computer at startup cuz it has to determine which fonts to load. Give it little options and you'll see great speed improvements. A guy just brought me his computer cuz it was so slow. It was almost brand new and it took nearly 15 minutes to start up. He had several thousand fonts on his computer. I removed all but 36 of them and it solved all of his problems.
Another way to speed up your computer is to reduce the amout of colors to 16 bit. Honestly, most people don't need more than that.
Increasing the size of your virtual memory paging file will help with computers that don't have a lot of ram. Don't set it to some insane amount like 4096mb. Your computer can only use so much.
Remove your background entirely. This will really help you. I would never do this though cuz I like my LBT background.
Get a registry optimization program. They arn't that expensive and they'll do ya a lot of good.
Remove startup programs. If there's something you don't want to start at startup, just go to the start menu and go to all programs and then go to startup. If there's a program in there that you don't need at startup, just delete the item from the menu. If the program you want to remove from startup isn't in the startup menu, just launch the program and go into the properties. It will most likely have an option to start at startup or not. This will REALLY help with startup speed.
for gods sake, don't have your computer try to start with the cd drive before the hard drive unless you're about to install an operating system. Just go into the BIOS setup menu and change the boot priority. This will shave as much as 45 seconds off startup time.
Same goes with other devices including floopy drives, slave hard drives and other removable media. Always set the master hard drive as the first boot device in the BIOS.
Reduce the amount of icons on the desktop. If necessary, just create a folder on the desktop called "desktop" and put everything that's currently on your desktop in it.
Remove the startup sound. It takes some time to load sometimes and is hard on your computer.
Using all of the methods above, I was able to make a computer that normally started up in 5 minutes to start up in 19.7 seconds. No hardware upgrades were required.
You must face the inevitable though. Sometimes, ya just need a hardware upgrade and there's nothing ya can do about it.
Does anyone else know other ways to speed up a computers startup time besides the methods I mentioned? I have just learned this by trial and error.
