Speed Up a Windows Computer in One Restart – Quick, Free and No Additional Software Needed

There are many hubs written on this topic. Some of them had comments recommending to clean up the desktop icons which slow you down! This would likely not help. Here is how to find out if you need to do anything or not.

After the computer is freshly booted, before you start anything, press Ctrl+Shift+Escape. This starts the task manager. Go to the processes tab and look at the bottom left corner for the number of processes running. Be sure that the “Show processes from all users” is checked – bottom left too. The number of processes on a healthy machine before applications are started should be around 40 or so. If you start up at 60 and up processes – keep reading.

The reason why there are so many processes is that the Windows startup contains too many entries – normally 90% of them are not needed at startup. A simple step as cleaning the startup will disable some of the processes and unleash power which you already have – no need to buy more memory, faster hard drive etc.

To clean up the start up on all Windows versions from XP to 7, click Start>Run, type msconfig and hit enter – this takes you to the system configuration utility (pictured). Click the startup tab and review the entries. Every time you make a change in there Windows will ask to be restarted – this is normal. You can safely click Disable All, OK and reboot. This removes all programs listed there from startup – your PC will start and run faster. Also if you check the task manager there will be less processes listed.

The programs are not removed or uninstalled – they are told not to come up at start. The disadvantage of clicking Disable All is that you would prevent your anti-virus program from starting too - for or against anti-virus software is a topic for another hub.

To be on the safe side, once you click on the startup tab, start removing the entries one by one. There is a short description of all entries there. In addition, a two-minute Google search will show you what these are. For example an entry called Reader_sl belongs to Acrobat Reader – it is completely legitimate and does not need to start at boot time. Best practices here are to do one entry at a time – then you wait a few days to see if you removed anything you needed. Again, applications are not removed – they are only deleted from the reference which tells them to start up automatically when Windows starts. You could leave a few programs to start up automatically.

One good habit to go into – next time you install software and the installer asks you if you want it to startup automatically – say no. Saves you trouble down the road.