Extremely slow boot time

Dear All,
My wife has a Toshiba Satellite M-35X thats a couple of years old. I have noticed that it takes forever for the laptop to boot and initially run programs. Once it is up and running, it is ok. Any suggestions on what might be wrong..as to why it takes forever to boot? What can I do to fix the problem? Any help would be great. Thanks
Cjay
PS- I always ask my wife to not keep the computer on standby for extended periods of time. She does it however, and I wanted to know if keeping the laptop in that mode for extended periods has any detrimental effect on its performance.

 

Get rid of unused startup entires. That is the main culprit. Go to "run"(Win+r), type "msconfig" withough quotes, then go to the startup tab, uncheck what you don't want to startup, then reboot.

 

Hi McGrady,
Thanks a lot for the suggestion. Can you guide me as I do that? I mean, although I know some stuff about computers, I do not feel confident about selecting what things need to startup and what dont. I would hate for me to uncheck something thats needed for the system to start up properly. Would it be helpful if I were to copy paste what starts up in here so that u can instruct?

 

And anything your not sure of, google it and you'll find out what it is and if its ok to disable.

 

I suggest removing un-needed startup items (using msconfig or ccleaner) as well as doing a defrag using JKdefrag. I have a feeling those should help you out quite substantially.

 

Of course, just post a screenshot and I will help you out.

 

Thanks a lot Jessica, Carrotmuncher and McGrady. McGrady, this might be a stupid question.but how do I take a screenshot?

 

On your keyboard there should be a Print Screen button near the top right. Press that, paste it in paint, save, then upload to www.imageshack.us and post the URL here. You may have to press Fn, then Prt Sc if its shared with another button.

 

Hi McGrady,
Sorry for the delay in getting this to you. Ok, here is the imageshack URL

 

You can disable everything except Avast(your Antivirus) and ctfmon.exe
You can disabled ctfmon, but it will just get enabled back anyways. I'm not sure of your Toshiba apps, but AFAIK you can disable those safely. And Notebook Maxmimizer? Is that a program you DL'd and use? If you downloaded that and made it start at startup leave that too. Everything else you can disable. Restart, and you should see a big improvement.

 

Thanks a bunch McGrady..tht was very very helpful. Thanks again

 

what i did lately for an xp installation that really took ages to start up and be usable:

run ccleaner (and check start items). clean up data and registry.
then i run defraggler to do a full disk defragmentation.
then i ran NTREGOPT to defragment the cleaned up registry.

afterwards it was very much faster. (espencially the NTREGOPT helped quite a bit. never thought it would).

 

Acutally, if you go to Start, Control Panel, Regional And Language Options, languages, details, advanced, then click 'turn off advanced text service' you'll disable ctfmon.exe

 

^^ Whilst ctfmon.exe can be disabled, or even removed, I personally would recommend to leave this process alone. It is using little resource and is nécessaire for Office package and multi-languages input handling

cheers ...

 

Just to add my 0,02$ to it.

I have an old Medion laptop too - its, bricked, and dual booting with Linux.

But back to XP - it loads slow as - god knows what.
I tidied it up but no real improvement.

I would have to reinstal Windows but I won't bother.

One of the problems of "old installations" is, that they accumulate registry entries and a large file structure...
With time every installation will slow down due to junk.
Less so if few things have been frequently installed & deinstalled, but if you say regularly test software, then I'd recommend reformatting quite frequently...

If you have the time - reinstalling the OS may be a good idea for a significan timprovement,

 

Oh, thanks for that. So all it does is handle foreign languages?

 

For the inquiring minds amongst us, Microsoft has a short little KB article on ctfmon.exe and what it's used for and how to minimize it's impact, KB282599.

 

It only applies to Office 02? I'm on 07. Not affected? ;p

 

It may be an old article.

I've got the file on a laptop that never went near Office 2002 - basically leave everything you can't identify, that's the safest option.

 

That I did not say, nor do I think it reasonable to infer that solely from the KB article.

 

Pass, all I know is that whenever I use word which I rarely do on the laptop, I've never had a problem. So I'm guessing having it turned off isn't affecting anything.

 

ctfmon.exe does not just "handle foreign languages" - it handles so-called alternate text services, such as input devices for physically disabled folk and whatnot - the KB article I referred to has a decent description of what ctfmon.exe does.

 

guys... there is both a vista and xp tweaks guide in the forum stickies... use them... they include all tips mentioned already in this thread, and alot more have fun tweaking!