Slow Boot- Help!

[Lone Wolf]

First of all, Norton AV 2004 is notorious for causing slow system boot times. .... But, once again, as long as you have Norton AV 2004, expect long boot times.

LOL... beedubaya it may seem like I'm pickin on ya... but really i'm not. I saw your posting and thought I would add my comments.

First of all, I've been using Norton products for the past 4-5 years and I will admit, that I do like their AV product more than any other product on the market for home users. I've used both Norton SystemWorks 2001 and 2003 and speak from that experience.

If you load the entire suite and have things like Norton DiskDoctor and CleanSweep turned on... as in having it start upon system boot up... then yes you will see slow boot times. However, calling Norton a piece of crap s/w is probably an overkill and a very subjective opinion.

There's tools within the Norton suite that I do not care for (like Clean Sweep) but the software gives you the optin to turn those options ON/OFF and it's very configurable in that respect. Now you may not like Norton, but the numbers speak for themselves... the last time I looked, they had a bigger market share than McAffee.

 

[Lone Wolf]

As I read this thread, there's a few things that are getting muddled together.

1) The registry exists as 2 binary files that Windows loads during the boot process. Most people do not realize that cleaning up dead entries in the registry shaves off only a couple of seconds off the boot time.

2) A slow boot time is not necessarily caused by a large registry but often caused by a heavily fragmented HDD or having several applications to run upon boot. As previously stated, the most common way to remedy that is to use the MSCONFIG utility and uncheck any applications you don't need upon start up.

3)

Also realize that as you load more stuff onto your computer, its going to generally boot up slower.

Much of that depends on your system specs (i.e. amount of RAM installed) and othe factors like how regularly you defrag your HDD.