Slow Booting Computers

Does your computer boot very slowly? Does it seem like it has been getting slower and slower as time goes by? I had a computer once that you would turn on and then go get your breakfast and coffee in order to allow it time to get booted properly. In this article I will discuss the major causes of a slow booting computer.

Disk Drive Too Full

Slow booting computers can be caused by having an overloaded disk drive. During the booting process your computer moves chunks of its memory from its memory chips to the hard drive and from the hard drive to the memory chips as they are needed. Normally, the operating system can anticipate exactly when to do this so that you do not notice it. However, once your hard drive becomes so full that there is insufficient room for this memory swapping your computer will slow down because your memory chips are over crowded.

Slow Booting Computer Because Of Insufficient Memory

Even if you have sufficient space on your hard drive for memory swapping, your computer may not have enough physical memory to use its operating system efficiently. This problem is usually seen in older computers that have had their operating system upgraded. If your computer has less than 512 MB of physical memory, then this is at least part of the cause of your slow booting computer.

Slow Booting Computers May Be Loading Too Many Programs

If you look in your system tray at the bottom right of your computer screen, you will see a lot of little icons. These icons represent programs that are running in the background on your computer. As time goes by, computers tend to collect more and more of these background programs. Each of them takes time to load and execute. So the more you have, the longer it takes to boot up your computer. Slow booting computers often have way to many of these programs loading and running in the background.

Slow Booting Computers May Have Fragmented Hard Drives

Data including your apps and programs reside on your computer's hard drive and are stored in blocks of data. As the hard drive spins and data is added and removed from the hard drive, your computer tries to find space to physically record this data on the hard drive. Over time this results in the data blocks becoming scattered all over the surface of the hard drive with blank gaps in between them.

This results in your hard drive's head jumping all over the place to load programs and data. This causes a slow booting computer. This is known as disk fragmentation and should be checked out if your computer boots slowly.

Slow Booting Computers Can Be Due To The Registry

Since your computer's registry stores all of the locations of your computers programs, this is where the computers looks when it boots up to see where the data it needs is stored. Over time, your computer can leave behind bogus entries in its registry or bits and pieces of entries from old software programs that have been uninstalled. As your computer boots, it is spending a lot of time sifting through the old garbage to find the information it needs to boot properly. Cleaning up your computers registry can have one of the most dramatic effects on your slow booting computer that you have ever seen.