How many background task are launched when you start it? Take a look in your startup folder. Chances are that you can remove most items you find there.
Any so called "quick starter" or application "helper"? Disable any of those you find, they only make the computer slower to start.
Check your notification area. Many of those may not be needed. Right-click or double-click them and change the settings so that they don't start with Windows. ONLY keep your anti-virus and those you REALY want to have.
Clean your internet cache, the temp and tmp folders, enpty the trash. Delete old patches uninstallers, you may have 100's of them... Ccleaner is great at that task and free.
Uninstall old applications that you no longer use.
Also, uninstall any bundled applications that came preinstalled. Most are realy not needed, redundant, trial or evaluation version or just plain obsolete. Some may be for services that are not available in your area like some ISP signup app for a provider situated in another country. This will potentialy free some gigs from your drive...
Now, launch a defragmentation of your drive. Fragmented drives are a huge source of over all slowdowns. If you have an SSD, you don't need to defragment it EVER!! In fact, you MUST NEVER efragment those. But you still need to defragment any other conventional hard drive you may have.
I highly recomend that you get some third party defragmenter as almost any will do a beter job than the one bundled with Windows. There are some good free offerings such as Defraggler.
Your antivirus may have been set to do a boot time scan. It's good once in a while to be used when you have a particularly hard to remove virus, but surely not at every start. Open your antivirus settings and disable startup scan.
You may also want to reduce the level of any real time protection to low and set some exclusions, like any folder containing only documents and medias. If you use Norton or McAfee, get RID of those and get something like AVG or Avira free editions. They are at least as good and much less bloated and resources hungry.
Similary, some defragmenters have a startup defragmentation option. It's a once a year thing that should normaly be left disabled.
Electro, May 2012
