I have this machine at home, running XP, and all of a sudden it is getting incredibly slow at startup. I installed Ad-Aware to make sure i don't have any hidden spamware running. It found nothing. So then i tried to find ways to make XP run or boot faster again. I know that the really failsafe way is re-installing my XP but i don't really have the guts to do that, reinstall all drivers and programs. So i tried my friend, Google. I found several articles allowing me to tune my xp-performance and startup time, i applied the ones i found sensible, the ones that were mentioned accross different pages. In short i think the best things you can do is uninstall unneeded programs, make sure that unwanted programs in the background can't start (msconfig). Bootvis seems interesting too, not entirely sure if it helped a lot. Defrag of course! :) Making sure your pagefile can't get defragged by making it large enough, preferable on a separate disk from your boot-drive. These changes seemed to improve my boot, although it is no where near a quick 20 seconds now :) It still takes a few minutes to get my computer completely ready. But suddenly i also lost my network connection. I was puzzled, did i stop one service too many? :) Everything seemed to work fine, but my network-card did not look for an IP address (DHCP). I tried to start my Firewall and i got an error stating the WSAStartup had failed to start, or was not started. WSAStartup? What is that? Looking on the internet i found a small tool, fixing WinSock problems, possibly related to de-installing programs. You never know. And i had no other clues to follow anymore. The tool is called WinsockXPFix. It supposedly could also backup my registry, but that failed in my case. So i just started it, in blind faith, knowing i had to re-install anyway if it wouldn't work. But guess what: i did! The program ran, rebooted automatically, and everything was back in working order! Windows XP, at the time, was promoted for its boot performance, it's self-tuning capabilities, yet over time it only becomes slower and slower. How does Vista handles this? Or Windows 7? Or is it inherent to Windows OS, and should we look at other alternatives. Sometimes i hate how much is done behind the scenes, how much is added. Each vendor or software installs its own version of "Automatic Updates", slowing down my system. Should I look at Mac OS X? Or Linux? Yet Linux still feels to "hardcore" for me, but maybe i am wrong. Should we look at different open source alternatives (in order of viability):
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