Ever wondered why your computer boots up slow and takes a long time every time you start it up? The longer you have it, the worse it seems to be. Yes, a long startup time is one of the toughest exams for a computer user.
Here’s the routine—you press your computer’s power button, it comes to life, but it takes several minutes before you can take full control.
You move your thumb, tap the letters on your keyboard, move the cursor with your mouse, but nothing is clickable. For your patience, your computer rewards you with a loading spinning wheel that looks just as excited to carry things along as you are.
Check Your Startup Items
Before you start banging on your keyboard or even thinking about shutting down your computer in the nearest Recycle Bin, try turning off your computer’s startup items.
Why? Because as you install and accumulate more and more applications, your startup times are affected by programs that are set to launch automatically when your computer starts up.
This creates a bottleneck as these startup applications take turns to be launched. As your computer processes this launch information, it waits for all of these programs to finish their routines before giving up control. To move things along, you’ll need to review your computer’s mandatory startup items.
Mac: Cleanup Startup Menu
If you’ve had your Mac for a while, it’s likely that some things on the computer are building up over time. Checking things like login items on your computer is a great way to see if an unused app is hogging your application memory.
To do so, simply go to “System Preferences,” select “Users & Groups,” and then select your user. From there, select the “Login Items” option to display the applications that are open during startup.
Then choose the apps you don’t want to open automatically and click the “Minus” sign down at the bottom.
PC: Trim Your Startup Items
Before moving on, we should explain why computers take forever to start up, and why they tend to wear out over time. When your computer starts up, it’s moving information from your slow hard drive, or “storage,” to the faster RAM, also known as “memory.”
The more information your computer has to transfer, the longer it takes for your computer to start up. And as your computer ages, more information is created. So, unless you want to upgrade to faster hardware (more on that later), the trick is to reduce the amount of information it has to transfer.
The best way to do this is to prevent programs from loading automatically on startup. Many programs on your computer are set to run automatically immediately, but most don’t have to.
On Windows 10 (or 8.1), there’s a quick way to check and manage your startup items. They are conveniently listed on a Task Manager tab.
This is not the only place where startup programs are found. You can use a program like Autorun to find another list of startup items and disable the ones that aren’t important. Autoruns tells you exactly what each program does, and it knows enough not to disable essential startup programs like your security software. count on us; The security software is well worth the time it takes to load.
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