Well the results from our poll are in. From just over 200 respondents, an overwhelming majority of people (45.33%) said that they sit and wait for the PC to start. My we are a patient bunch aren’t we!

Coming in second by a pretty large margin for the top things to do while waiting for your computer to start was to make a coffee (27.1%) and then taking a shower (8.7%).

We had some pretty interesting answers for people who wanted to enter their own answer including: do other tasks, make toast, listen to music, play freecell (we aren’t sure how if your computer is not yet started) and the scariest answer goes to ‘kill something’, we understand your frustration!

Thanks for everyone who participated in the poll. We will be sure to do more on a frequent basis.

For those people frustrated by how long they need to wait for the PC to start, there is one main reason that you computer takes so long to start and that is that you have so many programs starting when Windows starts. The reason for this is that every software manufacturer in existence thinks that its software is the most important software on your computer and as such by default they set their software to automatically run when Windows starts. The question you need to ask yourself is ‘What software do I really need running when Windows starts?’. After you have that answer you can shut down all other programs from starting. You can do this in a couple ways; you can open each one of these programs and find the setting that enables the program to start and disable this setting, or, you can use the StartUp Manager found in Registry Reviver. The StartUp Manager in Registry Reviver shows you a list of all programs that are present in the Windows StartUp directory. You can uncheck the programs you don’t want to run and then save your settings, Done!

If you are unsure of which programs to disable then there a couple resource hog culprits that we would recommend disabling. These include:

• Instant messaging software
• Printer software
• More than one security program (we recommend only having one in the first place, so uninstall others)
• Software update services like Apple and Google
• Search indexing services

Disabling these items will give you a noticeable decrease in computer load time and you can always start these programs after you computer has finished loading anyway.