How to boost startup time and generally speed up my Asus G60J

I have two laptops, the Asus G60J which has seen very little use and my Dell Studio. Specs are superior on the Asus but it has always felt sluggish and slow in general right out of the box. I tried to uninstall some of the crap from Best Buy but didn;t succeed in that.
I was going to get more RAM and go from 4 to 8 gigs, on the Asus which is running 64bit Win 7 Home Premium but was told it is only capable of 4 gigs. Is that right?? If so, what can I do to shorten the start up time, without disabling anything I shouldn't?
I run the usual apps for maintenance like Spybot, Malware Bytes, and Microsoft Security Essentials -- all one at a time so as not to put any more strain on system resources.

All thoughts are most appreciated.

 

Best thing you can do is install a SSD.

 

That is something I had not thought about. Any particular brand?

 

Samsung Pro or Samsung EVO.

 

I can also vouch for Samsung, I also have Crucial in most of my machines though or will in the near future.

 

3 things, an SSD (basically 256gb of any major brand at this stage, the differences are negligible for you since its a high performance machine to begin with), Windows 8 Pro and a custom UEFI BIOS.

The SSD is the absolute deal maker here, nothing else will boost your boot times as much as this.

Windows 8 takes advantage of SSDs well because of it's Fast Boot feature, basically it is sort of a half hibernation mode so your boot times become somewhat dependent on Sequential read speeds which most modern SATA3 SSDs have in spades (as opposed to Windows 7 which is mostly QD1 Random 4k dependent, which is now stagnating or even regressing amongst the modern SSDs). Only drawback is the god awful interface.

Finally, a modern UEFI BIOS is needed. Most manufacturers released new BIOSes when Windows 8 came out so be sure to check and see if your machine has one. The features you are looking for are UEFI boot, Fast Boot and Secure Boot. UEFI is much faster than the old BIOS system for initializing the pre-windows boot environment (by a factor of at least 50%). Fast Boot is included in most Dell and ASUS laptop BIOSes I've encountered but I cannot be sure for your models, it basically only loads the absolute most necessary startup devices to cut the time you spend at the BIOS splash screen (usually a matter of about 2 seconds vs 5 seconds without). Finally, Secure boot allows your BIOS to seamlessly transition from the pre-BOOT BIOS environment to the Windows 8 bootloader thus shaving a few extra seconds, the extra security is nice too. Essentially, it is best if you can find someone who can Mod the BIOS to enable these features for you but 90% of the time you are probably gonna be stuck with what the manufacturers give you.

 

Win 7 home premium can handle 8gb no problem

Beamed from my G2 Tricorder

 

Intel 530 > Samsung SSD's.