Are you in front of that computer monitor staring at the hourglass icon that has been up on your screen for five minutes? You have to check your e-mail before you go to work, but your computer is taking forever to boot. You keep asking yourself in frustration, “Why does my computer take so long to boot up?” With the knowledge of why this happens, you can easily prevent it and make booting up as easy as waking up yourself… well that may vary. Regardless of your hard rive size, RAM, or whatever, there is usually one main issue that causes your computer to boot slow.

When you install a new program, it likes to believe it is important so it puts itself in your start up folder. This makes it turn on when your computer starts up. When you get several of these, Windows is so over burdened with programs that it is super slow.

First and foremost, you must go into the Start Menu, select Run, type in “msconfig” (without the quotes), which will bring up the System Utility Configuration. Select the Start-up Tab and deselect any programs that aren’t needed upon start-up. If you are unsure about a certain program, then leave it. This will greatly enhance your boot up speed as your computer is not struggling to get multiple programs started before the desktop screen even appears.

Once you have done this you can try deleting old programs that you don’t use anymore by going to your Control Panel and selecting Add/Remove Programs. I just did that to my computer and noticed that I had an old video game installed that was taking up 300 MBs and I haven’t used it in over 6 months!

Lastly, once you have done all of this, run a Disk Defragmenter to put all of the files that naturally get spread out over time back together. To do this, right click on My Computer, Properties, Tools, Defragment.

Restart and notice the amazing change in boot up speed.

If you are still experiencing problems and are still asking, “Why Does My Computer Take so Long To Boot Up?” then I would go a step further and run a virus scan on your computer to make sure that there are no malicious files present.