Troubleshooting Slow Vista Startup

After heavy use, you may notice that your computer takes longer and longer to start up. One of the most common reasons for this is that Windows uses a prefetch cache. This means that Windows will often load frequently used programs every time the computer boots up. The more programs you install on your computer, the more programs will be loaded into memory before your computer will complete the boot process. After an extended period of time, your computer will take longer and longer to start up. Making matters even worse is that many common (but non-critical) programs and applications will often automatically start up whenever Windows starts. If you do not have adequate memory installed on your machine every single program on your computer will slow down to the point where it is not even usable anymore.

One of the most common causes of impaired computer performance is having too many programs running at startup. Each active program is using a portion of the system memory, leaving less space and memory for other programs once they have been opened.

There are several steps that can be taken to get your computer to start up faster. A common wan to improve start up speed is to disable or modify the prefetch cache. In order to successfully complete this task, go to the windows folder, open the prefetch folder and delete all of the files inside that folder. If you are new at doing this, you may want to back up everything just in case you inadvertently delete an important file. After deleting the files, the reboot will be slow. This is not a cause for alarm, your machine is simply getting used to the new configurations. Future reboots will be much faster after Windows relearns the prefetch for system files.