Boot up time

[mintymow]

My computer seems to take ages (at least 5 -6 minutes) to boot up. It never used to take this long. Do I have a problem? Is there anything I can do to reduce this time scale. I'm not very computer literate but can have a go with instruction. Many thanks

[sara3]

the very basics would be running a disc clean-up and defrag.. both of which are in your system tools.

do you have any anti-virus on your pc?

[mintymow]

Hi sara3, I have looked at the possibility of defrag but after scanning the disc the system says it's not necessary. Yes I am running a anti-virus. I could look at clean-up though. Thanks

[sara3]

how long have you had the computer?

[mintymow]

about 2 years

[sara3]

well I'm no expert (I'm sure one will come along!) but make sure your anti-virus definitions are up to date and run all the scans.

[HillyHugger]

5-6 minutes seems extreme but you probably have a lot of programs starting automatically . You don't say which operating system you have but

http://netsquirrel.com/msconfig/

gives you links for XP or Vista . This should help for a start .

[ACtheTROLL]

sara and hilly are right

one other thing though how much free discspace?

windows and the ntfs file system likes 20% free to work in
that means you need 30%+ free on your windows partition

for cleanup
http://www.ccleaner.com/download
(it is free - but asks for a donation)
run with defaults - if you bank and log onto sites you might want to leave cookies intact

also if you have a huge amount of small files - mp3 or jpgs
that can affect performance simply because the contents database is huge
1x4Gb file needs only 1 MFT entry
4Gb of JPGs could need 10000s of entries to search

[mintymow]

Thanks everyone for your help, I will look at the sites you have mentioned. I have a lot of empty disc space, AND do have a lot of MP3 and Jpg files.

[ACtheTROLL]

not got virus scanner to scan on startup??
Tried it out - ridiculous startup time