2 replies to this topic

[InfiniteD]

Hello. Long time no see, all. I have a laptop which runs Win2K SP4, and on initial startup, it can be excruciatingly slow booting up. It's actually been this way for quite some time. I've checked thoroughly for viruses and spyware, downloaded and ran Lexun RegScrub (which I loved by the way) and cleaned out the registry of obsolete entries (to the best of my knowledge), and double-checked my startup apps against the excellent list found at http://www.bleepingc...er.com/startups as well as giving the hard drive a good cleanup and defrag. To my surprise, my startups were actually fairly clean. This seemed to improve performance somewhat, but not as much as I would like, which has led me to target "Services" as my next step. I am taking things very carefully, only making one change at a time, and then rebooting, and keeping a careful log of any changes I make so I can back-trace any steps I make and fix any potential problems. I'm also only setting things to "Manual" rather than "Disable", which hopefully would be easier to overcome should I accidentally select the wrong Service. At any rate - I found one helpful site which lists Win2K startup services, the ones which are required for the computer to run properly, and those which can be set to "Manual" to hopefully improve system performance. This site is at http://searchwinit.techtarget.com/tip/0,28...i778742,00.html. I'm curious to know if anyone knows of any others that exist? Any that are maybe a little more thorough? This one isn't bad, I guess. It could just be the bottom line fact that my computer is not brand new, cutting edge. It is a PIII 1133mhz, but only has 256MB RAM. Ouch! I've never installed laptop memory, but I have a feeling this may help. Meanwhile, I'm just trying to make the best out of what I already have.

[dobhar]

Hi Dude...long time no see...

Linky's...
- http://www.techspot....win2k_services/
- http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechn...s/win2ksvc.mspx

BlackViper had a good guide but his site's been down for a bit now...

[Smokey]

Hello InfiniteD,

Just to add to Dobhar's post, you can tweak the services, even add more memory and it will take several minutes to complete booting and startup your basic programs. That's because it has a 4800rpm or less hard drive installed. It's not that hard to install a 7200rpm Laptop Hard Drive but you would have to re-install windows. Your boot time will change from over 2 minutes to about 30 seconds. Everything else will be faster also. It will be like a new laptop.

Hard drive installation in most laptops is about 5 minutes. You can use the old hard drive for a usb powered external hard drive if you buy an enclosure like this.. Then you can transfer your files (not your operating system) back to the lappy.