Usually whenever I visit any of my friend's house, they always ask me one or other thing about their computer and in almost every one's house I find that their computer boot relatively very slow.  I make some small changes in their PC's configuration and voila, they get amazed that their computer can boot infact much faster.
On my computer, it just takes few seconds to start ie. windows XP Professional I am using.  I use couple of simple yet effective tweaks to make my computer boot faster.
Here now  I am sharing few, I will use few techniques which can be applied to any computer even running any other operating system than XP.

How to make windows xp boot faster

1. Optimizing Bios
BIOS stands for Basic Input / Output System, it is bios which first boot your system and then handle control of your computer to operating system. In bios, usually two things you can do to boot computer little faster and actually it impacts a lot.

• Setting right boot device order:

This is most common misconfiguration in computers if you never touched your bios, actually it is set to boot from Floppy driver or from CDROM / DVD drive and then only after if both above fails, then it looks for your hard drive for boot records. So wasting a lot of seconds.
So how to enter into BIOS and what to modify?
When you press computer then usually you can enter BIOS by pressing F2 key, in many system it is done by DEL key. So when you enter you bios, look for boot device order or BOOT option and their set your Hard drive to look first for boot record.
I am not going in details how to do it step by step as there are some variation but looking into BIOS carefully, you can easily find out.

• Enabling Quick Boot:

While system boots, BIOS go through some basic test which you can actually skip to boot it faster. Many bios do not have this feature and many does. My earlier computer had this feature ie. Enable Quick Boot but the one now I am using is without this. It will not give a boost to boot but yes, you will have marginal improvement.
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2. Removing Unnecessary Programs from Startup
These days, it is trend for most of the program to add themselves in startup registry so that they run as soon as you boot XP, gradually normal user end up with a load of startup programs using system resources for no reason.
For example, people using Yahoo messenger will find that its their in system tray as soon as you boot your computer but it is of no use untill you are not really using it.



So it is safe to disable any item which you do not need. It will really decrease time of startup for your computer.
How to disable unwanted startup items ?
It is quite easy in windows XP.
Goto --> Start --> Run --> (Type "msconfig")
You will see following screen, now goto "Startup" .



Disable all unwanted service / application like Yahoo messenger, MS office startup, anything you don't use. Make sure you do not disable your "Antivirus" at startup, I have two-three things enabled at startup which I really need running all the time.

Now press "OK" to apply, it will ask for RESTART or EXIT WITHOUT RESTART, you may choose whatever you want and next time when you will boot, you will see a huge improvement.

NOTE: If you are unsure about certain service or program listed there then simply give a search on internet by its name and you will find its detail so you can decide to disable or not to disable.

3. Using Prefetch feature of Windows XP
I am using this point here as you will find a lots of blogs / sites mentioning that modifiying REGISTRY KEY to set prefetcher to 2 will help system. But the fact is that there is no citation that it really helps, moreover I was not able to find the difference.
So I suggest not to get mis-information about windows prefetcher. You can know more about it here.

Finally
There are few other methods which can improve boot time of your windows XP but I have mentioned only those which are most effective.

If you find this article helpful then please stop by and give some valuable comments.

Thankyou Kammy for your positive response. I am aware of Tune up utilities2008 but never used it. Basically the utility do all those things which you can do without it. For instance, people highlights that it has disk-defragmentation facility better than window's inbuilt but I never defrag my system and reason is that now a days, disk being faster and efficient as well as very very big as compared to older time, then defraging your disk is really wastage of time and resources.
If still you are in doubt, one day, just do a disk defrag and don't perform any other peformance enhancing function and you will never notice any improvement in system performance.

Tune is up is good and it actually makes things very simple but over hyping something is also not good. I will soon try out system utilities carefully and will try to post / write article that how to use that software efficiently and effectively.

Btw, it is a paid software and there are few free software available which can do many things as it do.. so why not go for freeware.

Its first time I came to know about "windows care" .. but when looking into, again found that they are just over hyping things. Its not completely free though so if we can do such things with freewares and that too very efficiently then why to bother about such softwares.