ver the last couple of articles, we have looked at the complexities of the windows boot process, starting from switch-on right up to the point of being able to use the thing as a computer.

As I suggested, depending on many things, this might take up to five minutes to complete. Is there any way we can reduce the time taken?

The answer is usually, yes. There are changeable and configurable items that can reduce the boot time by as much as 50%, depending on the age of your system, and how many programs you load into memory.

The first thing you can do, as we have covered before, is install more memory. Memory is the single item of hardware that can be increased without significant cost, and can bring massive improvements in response and boot-time.

The second thing is regular maintenance. We covered defragmentation some time ago, but I cannot emphasise how staying on top of your fragmentation will assist in keeping your boot-time to a minimum.

Thirdly, you can look at the personal settings you have for your user account and remove the number of programs you load into memory at boot-time. Here?s a quick, history lesson: When hardware was slow and cumbersome, application programmers would write into their programs an element called ?terminate and stay resident? (or TSR). What this entailed was writing software in such a way that if it was loaded into memory, when the user quit, the program ? or at least elements of it ?would stay in memory, so that when the user next required the program, it would not take an age to load, and the user would enjoy a much quicker initial entry into the application.

Sometime after this idea was introduced, an elaboration from it brought about TSR at boot-time. Thus you could set-up a particular application to load its TSR elements at boot-time and thus enjoy much quicker initial entry to the program at the time you required it.

The trouble with this approach is that virtually ALL software vendors adopted it. Thus, any software you now buy will often load a ?boot-time TSR? element. Of course, today, we no longer need this type of program: Processors are much faster, memory more affordable and greater in capacity, and yet STILL software vendors persist in providing a TSR element to their application.

The best approach is to remove the TSR element from your boot-time. Depending on the program there are several ways to do this: Firstly many programs allow you to switch off the TSR elements. Thus, if you find the program in the ?system tray? at the bottom right of your screen, right-click it and see whether there are configuration options that allow you to turn it off.

Secondly, if there are no configuration options from the icon in the system-tray, you can often find the configuration options within the actual program next time you run it.

Finally, if there appears to be no-way to remove the program from the start-up options, you can get Windows to remove it, by physically removing the start-up option from the start-up folder in the Program Files folder. Go to ?My Computer?, select your ?C:? Drive, the select ?Program Files?. Within that folder there will be another folder called ?Start-up?, go into it. Residing here are copies of each application program that will start-up automatically when you boot-up. I personally, always leave this totally empty ? but that is up to you ? there may be some applications that you DO want to start automatically (such as Instant Messaging), and they should be left.

However, from here you can delete all the programs you choose - deleting them from here WILL NOT delete the actual program, just the copy of the program that is started at boot-time.

The final thing we can do to improve the length of time to boot, is to have it log us in automatically, instead of waiting for us to select a user account etc.

Next week we?re going to run our first ?Ask an Earthling Question? column, where I will answer some of YOUR questions. Thanks to all who sent in questions ? unfortunately I cannot answer all of them, but I will answer a selection.