Windows XP Slow Startup and Shutdown

According to Microsoft, Windows XP was designed to boot up within about 30 seconds. Add several additional services and that can become a minute. You can slush it but not much. It depends on how much additional functionally you want to be included. If you need multiple services enabled you might need probably up to two minutes.

Slow start and shutdown can be a symptom of Spyware infection or bloated configuration or both.

Generally Windows XP is not running that good on 256M PC and Windows 2000 here has an edge. Windows XP is definitely more resource hungry and on 256K PC feels slower.

As Spyware problems are addresses on the other set of pages here we will concentrate on the problem of bloat. To access the level of bloat on a particular PC the list of services running after booting (before you open any other program) as well as list of start-up programs should be printed, saved into a file (see for suitable command line tools to do this) and carefully analyzed.

Then you can trim unnecessary start-up programs file using msconfig from the Run menu and unnessary services from Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Services

Even if you do not find some rogue services installed, the results of analysis usually get you better understanding of what is used by the computer and several services Microsoft and third party services can usually be disabled.

Actually many third party services are just a nuisance and should be disabled. Symantec, Adobe, and ATI are especially bad in this area. They also put unnecessary program into system tray (can be called recidivist system tray abusers ;-)

If you have just 256M of RAM Windows XP often looks sluggish (Windows 2000 is much faster on the same configuration) and large add-ons like Windows Defender are overkill: they slow down the system considerably. It might be beneficial to eliminated them.

Generally with 256K you need cut your services and resident programs to bones in order to cut swapping of pages from disk. Watch the activity of your swap file.

Detail on load processes after boot-up are visible any process viewer. But just viewing it is not enough. You need to write this snapshot into file and analyze and annotate it line by line (most non-standard free Windows Process Viewers has this capability). Many antispyware programs like Windows Defender also have such tools.

Tips

• Turn off automatic updates. You can do them manually once a week (you really need to be diligent with this as current generally or worms and spyware is not a joke). Even notifications are pretty taxing and involve scanning for automatic updates on startup with 3-5 minutes of almost 100% CPU usage when you PC or laptop became sluggish and almost impossible to work with. If you do not mind drinking a cup of coffee before starting work it might be a perfect opportunity.
  

• Windows Protector is a resource hog and is slows down 256K PCs. Here you need to wait you need to spyware protection and you need for quick and responsive PC. Windows Protector is a good security tool from the point of view of catching spyware, the problem is that it is designed for PCs with at least 512M of RAM and CPUs faster then 1.2GHz.
  

• Periodically, once a week or once a month defragment your C drive and other drives that you are using frequently. See Maintaining Windows 2000 Through Defragmentation for details. The best strategy that I have found is to start defragmentor each day when you are going for lunch.
  

• Sometimes very slow startup means that you have remote drives for which server is currently unavailable mapped permanently for your desktop. The simplest solution is to delete all such mappings.
  

• Initial versions of IE7 are not a blessing for PC with 256M configuration: they are a curse. They are bloated slow pigs. With 256M of RAM IT7 slow down PC considerably. Startup of IE7 is painfully slow and its shutdown looks more like shutdown of the whole OS that an application and is extremely painful too. You need more lightweight browser as 50M that IE7 consumes represent 20% to RAM you have. If you use IE7 use tabs instead of opening additional instances of the browser, but still it adds approximately 5M for each additional tab (more for the second tab -10M, lightly less for third, forth and so on) Each additional tab do not add Generally IE7 is a memory and CPU hungry pig so its usage on such limited configuration should be strongly discouraged.

  Opera is not a bad browser that might fit your needs (Firebox and Netscape both are resource pigs too: not a big improvement over IE). It has the initial memory footprint of approximately 16M. But you might suffer from using non-mainstream browser.
  

• Acrobat Reader 7.xx or later on 256M PC slow down things by consuming too much memory and increases size of swap file. Replace it with something less bloated. Acrobat Reader 4 is OK. See Alternatives to Adobe Products and How to Fight Adobe Acrobat Bloatware for details. Again if you move from standard you might suffer as some complex form are rendered correctly only in original IE.
  
• Often restoring older image of C: drive using Ghost eliminates recent slowdown caused by some installed application(s) more effectively that painstaking troubleshooting. Regular ghosting of your C drive and keeping set of dated images on DVD in a special folder is important sanity preserving strategy for any Windows XP user. They often come handy in case of troubles and can save you a lot of time.
  
• You can access the services console by entering the SERVICES.MSC command at the Run prompt. It provides good description for most Microsoft services.
  
• You can access Startup folder content from msconfig utility and directly from the registry. For example if the user is joeuser, then his startup menu will be at Documents and Settings/joeuser/Start Menu/Startup Please note that some entries can be at in "All users" or even "Default User" hierarchy
  
• On older laptops like Dell C600 and C610 one of the most common causes of Windows shut down problems is a bug in Roxio's Easy CD Creator version 5.
  
• Executable compressor like UPX can improve start up times on PC with slow harddrive (5400 RMP drives on laptop) and fast CPU (1.2 GHZ and faster).
  

• O'Reilly Network -- Hacking Windows XP

  The quickest way to speed up boot times is to use the free Microsoft utility BootVis.exe. Although it's intended primarily for developers, anyone can use it to analyze their boot times and see where there are slowdowns. More important, the tool will also automatically make system changes to speed up your boot time, so you don't need to go into a lengthy analysis of where your slowdowns are and how to solve them

  Depending on your system and how it's set up, you may see only a moderately faster startup time, or you may speed up boot time dramatically. I've seen reports of improvements ranging from a little over 3 seconds to more than 35 seconds. The improvements I found on my systems were moderate-7 seconds faster on one, and 10 seconds faster on another. Think of all the things you could accomplish with another 10 seconds in the day!

  The BootVis utility traces boot time metrics and then displays the results in a variety of graphs showing total boot time, CPU usage, disk I/O, driver delays, and disk utilization.

  Download it from www.microsoft.com/whdc/hwdev/platform/performance/fastboot/default.mspx and extract it into its own folder.

  Go to the folder and double-click on BootVis.exe.

  To analyze how your system boots, choose Trace → Next Boot. (Choose Trace → Next Boot + Driver Delays if you want to trace delays caused by drivers as well as your normal boot sequences.)

  Tell the program how many times to reboot and run the test (the more times it runs, the more accurate the results, although the longer the test takes to run). Click OK, and your system will reboot.

Source: Softpanorama.org