Does your computer seem to be intent on driving you crazy? Sometimes it seems that we wait for what seems like an eternity for the computer to boot up so we can do something. What in the world could that computer be doing for so long between the time you press the 'On' button and the Windows screen finally showing up? Of course, once Windows does load up it usually takes a couple more minutes of clicking and grinding before the mouse pointer finally changes from hourglass to arrow. By that time, you're lucky if you still remember what you wanted to do in the first place. This week, in my constant effort to help you maintain your computer sanity, we'll talk a bit about how to make that computer startup faster.

There are a few factors that could be making your computer run just barely faster than an overweight slug crawling through an Eastern Kentucky mud hole in winter. First, check to see how much hard drive space you have left. If you are getting low, meaning less than 1.5 gigabytes of free space, start looking for stuff to delete. Another potential gotcha that can make computers startup really slowly is the icons on your desktop. Make sure that every icon on the screen is a shortcut to a document, picture, program, game or whatever. You can put actual programs on the desktop rather than shortcuts (a shortcut is a link to an item, not the item itself) and this can cause real problems on startup. A desktop shortcut is a very small file and takes virtually no time to load and display on the screen. If you actually store an image or program itself on the desktop then you could be loading literally several megabytes of information just to show it on your screen when a shortcut would have worked better and faster.

One of the biggest foes to fast computers is the software that starts up automatically when the computer is turned on. Things like Yahoo Messenger, Windows Messenger, the infamous Weather Bug, and Real Player all do this, among others. Once you install the software, it loads itself every single time the computer is started up. Many times you will not even know that the program is running as there is no indication except for a tiny little icon in the lower-right corner of your screen called the Task Bar Notification Area.

These software programs are so egotistical they think that you simply must have them at the ready at any moment. I mean, you never know, it could be a matter of life or death that you send Aunt Sally in Michigan an instant message that little Junior just bit the cat. Surely we don't want to wait a whole 15 seconds for a program to load when we want to use it... Instead it sits there, always ready at a moment's notice. Trouble is, while it is sitting there it is wasting extremely valuable computer resources. I suggest you set those programs to not load up when you start the computer. But how?

The answer to that question may be very easy or very difficult, depending on the application. First, try looking in the Startup folder in your programs menu (click Start --> Programs --> Startup) to see what is set to automatically startup. Often, you won't see anything, but it's worth a shot. Next, open the offending program and look in the preferences/options/tools menu for something indicating that you do not want the program to load on startup. As a last resort, and please be careful if you do this as you can really mess up your computer, you can click Start --> Run, type msconfig, and hit the enter key. This will open an application that will allow you to remove any startup programs. Rather than running msconfig yourself, I do recommend you hire a qualified computer technician as it can really mess things up if done incorrectly.

As always, if you have any questions or suggestions for future articles, please email me at mike@mikebryant.com.