Hi, I’m Bruce Neil your frugal tech. Wouldn’t be great if your computer booted up as fast as your TV set turns on? Isn’t it frustrating to sit there and wait, wait, have a cup of coffee, read the newspaper while you’re waiting on your machine to boot up. You know it was seen that newer operating systems would actually boot quickly than the old ones but for the most part that’s not been the case. Now, Window 7 does indeed—I can testify this. It boots much quicker than Window Vista. But look, there are some things you can do to help your computer boot up a little quicker.
And so that first thing that you want to do is you want to eliminate unnecessary software on your computer. The way you’re going to do that is you go in—if you’re using Windows XP is you’re going to go to the control panel, add, remove programs, get a list to the applications and look for stuff you haven’t use for a long time and get it out of there. Some of that software might actually be running as a process in the background on your computer using up memory and CPU cycles. If you’re using Windows Vista, you’d want to go to control panel programs and features to get that complete list of software and get rid of that.
The other thing, even if it’s a new computer, a lot of times they come ship with what we call Trialware. I’d refer to as crap ware so there are a lot of other people. And again, this can be running as a process and the background on your computer. There’s a free tool called Decrapifier that you can run that. We’ll find this Trialware help you get rid of it. So that’s on the first things that you can do.
The second thing that you can do is you can go in to—was called MS config. Now, on your XP machine, you hit the start menu, the run box and type in MS config. I think you do the same on Vista. But you run the MS config and that’s going to bring up a dialogue box and there’s going to be a tab to start up. Look for star up applications that you may not normally want to start up. Let me give you an example in talking about. You do want to have your anti-spyware, your anti-virus software boot up with your computer and running all the time. You may not need the things like your digital camera software running all the time. So by using MS config, you can stop those applications from disabled them from booting up and running without deleting them because you’re going to be needing this stuff in the future. And if that becomes a problem for you can easily re-enable them at a later point. So that’s the next thing you can do.
Then let’s talk about your bios on your computer and bios, does the memory checks, it looks all the hardware on the system, looks at the boot sequence of all the drives and that sort of thing. If you’ve not made any re-modification to your RAM for example for a long time and you have the options what is called the quick boot or a skip memory check, you might want to enable those because that can speed up your boot time as well. You can take a lot at the boot sequence that you’re working with. You know is the checking things like USB drives and optical drives before it goes to the hard disk? Well, that’s going to take some more time for your computer to boot up or remember, if you have experience or have somebody knows what they’re doing before he start tinkering with the bios.
Finally, Windows maintains what’s called a registry. Now the Windows Registry is a database more or less of how Windows—what was hardware the system has, your software preferences, your user profiles, all that had tracks in the Windows Registry. So what happen is, is when you uninstalled, delete, add software it leaves bits and pieces of it behind in the Windows Registry. It gives kind of clog with this sort of stuff and can slow down the boot process as well.
There are some free applications such as CCleaner to clean up the registry and then there’s paid application such as system mechanic that can do that. But you better know what you’re doing because it’s real easy to totally host up Windows and then you’re looking at potentially fix on your hands there.
But by doing these things, you can make your Window PC boot up a little bit faster, maybe make things a little bit more verbal and get the work and start making some money a little bit quicker when your computer. Listen on Bruce Neil frugal tech, we always enjoy hearing from you. We’ll like you comments, also make sure to visit our website www.frugal, that’s F R U G A L brothers.com. And remember the senior shop, not making your money or save your money, gives out there. I’ll talk to you later.
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