You hit the power on button on your PC, wait for minutes for the Microsoft boot up logo to even appear, before finally hitting your desktop. In all, it took you about 10 minutes. Sounds familiar to anyone? It is a fact that about everyone at sometime would have had this hair-pulling experience of slow Windows PC boot up.

While the geeks blame the slow boot up of Windows PC on its design architecture, however, how fast your PC boots is usually dependent on your PC processor speed, RAM, viruses, and installed program that load during boot up. Using fairly recent PC hardware with decent specifications, the average boot up time for fresh installations of various Windows OSes should not take up to 30 seconds, even with the dreadful Windows Vista. Windows 8 has actually put Microsoft haters to shame by greatly improving on its bootup time by saving the system state and memory contents to a file on disk, and simply reload it on reboot, rather than initiating everything all over again. You can actually boot up a new installation of Windows 8 in less than 10 secs!

Okay, that seems like a tall tale as most never get to experience these speeds mainly because right from when your PC slides out of the production line, manufacturers already have them stuffed with bloatwares – softwares you never asked for and you will never need. Thing is, for every single softwares that you install, chances are that it will negatively impact on your boot up speed.

I will take you through a routine that can help to reduce the time it takes to boot up your PC.

• Click your Start Menu button. Check for the RUN link on the right pane, it is at the bottom. For Windows 8, just type RUN from your Start Screen
• Not there? Okay, right click on the Start Menu and select Properties
• Click the Start Menu tab and click Customize
• Scroll down and select the check box labelled Run Command
• Click Okay twice
• Now go back to your Start Menu, click Run
• Type into the dialogue box msconfig
• Click the Services tab
• Select the Hide Microsoft Services checkbox at the bottom of the dialogue box. Trust me, you do not want to mess with stuff that can break your system. Unselect everything else except anything that has to do with your antivirus. You can always select any other service you may need later.
• Click Exit Without Restart
• Next select the Start Up tab. Here again leave everything related to your Antivirus or Intel. Uncheck or disable everything else.
• Close the dialogue box and restart your system.

You should notice an improvement in the boot up speed of your PC.

If you are confused about any step, check out my video on Youtube here.