Windows 7 / Getting Started

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Eliminate unnecessary auto-start programs

Probably the most common thing that slows down Windows' loading time is all of the programs that are configured to load at boot time. Not only do they take a while to load, but they commonly eat up processor cycles while they're running, which in turn causes other programs to load more slowly.

Open the Performance Information and Tools page in Control Panel, and click the Advanced tools link on the left. If you see an alert that reads, "Startup programs are causing Windows to start slowly," click the link to view details.

The entry corresponds to a single incident in the event log, in which a particular program took longer to boot than usual. But despite the lone alert here, and its Date reported indicating that the incident happened months ago, there may be many similar entries in the log, some more recent than others.

Click the View details in the event log link to fire up Event Viewer (eventvwr.msc), and then click the Date and Time column header to sort the list chronologically. Since delays that happened weeks ago aren't of much concern, focus on those from the last few days. If one program stands out as a repeat offender, try the Level column header to group the events by severity.

There's more running on your PC than the handful of icons in the notification area (tray) suggests, and there are several places where startup programs are specified in addition to the Startup folder in your Start menu.

Make more free disk space

You may not have enough free disk space for your virtual memory (swap file) to operate comfortably. Windows uses part of your hard disk to store portions of memory; the more disk space you devote to your swap file, the easier it will be for Windows to store data there. See "Optimize Virtual Memory and Cache Settings" in this tutorial for more information.

The easiest way to create more free disk space is to delete the files on your hard disk that you no longer need; see "If in Doubt, Throw It Out" in this tutorial for a safe way to do this.

Lastly, a new hard disk-particularly an SATA 3.0 drive with NCQ (Native Command Queuing) and at least a 32 MB cache-will give you dramatically more disk space and can improve boot time considerably. If you're on the fence about replacing that older drive, consider the performance boost as well as the free space you'd get.

Interested in testing the speed of your hard disk? Check out HD Tune, available for free from http://www.hdtune.com/. For help interpreting the results, see http://www.vistaclues.com/ how-to-test-and-understand-hard-disk-drive-performance/.