I have an old laptop which had been running very slow, especially on startup. I could spend a good one to two minutes waiting from the login page until it becomes usable. It's that slow. Spec wise: Intel Pentium M 1.73 Ghz, 2Gb Ram, 5400 Rpm Hard disk drive. It's not the best spec but when I first got it, performance felt pretty good. Starting up the computer took roughly 45 seconds in total and everything runs smooth. The Good old time.

In general Windows XP startup time should take about 40 seconds on average. It should normaly take 30 seconds to get to the login page, and 10 seconds from the login page to ready state. I firmly believe there is not much you can do to improve load time to get to the login page, and it should remain virtually constant all the time. Now for login page to ready state load time is a different story. The more software and services you have installed in your PC, the more likely you'll add more time to the login page loading time. Especially software that is in your startup folder and software that has a monitor icon in the notification area, as those software will always get run on startup. Anyway, last night I finally got fed up and decided to do some investigation to find out why it takes ages for windows to start up. I know I could just re-format and do a clean windows install, but that would take too much time (considering that I have to re-install all of my programs too).

First of all I remove all the programs I found in the startup folder (only found witty there). Restarted my laptop, it’s a bit better but still takes a long time for my windows to start up. Then I need to find out which software/service that gets run on startup that bogs down my startup time. Thus on startup I quickly bring up the task manager to see which process is taking the most CPU load. I found the culprit, which is MsMpEng.exe taking up 30%-80% of the CPU and it lasted most of the startup time. So I googled it, and it turns out that the process belongs to Windows Defender. I disabled it, restarted my laptop and BAM. My login page start up time dramatically decreased to about 15-20 seconds. Fearing that this might be a one time thing, I restarted my laptop for a few more times and I still got the same result. Moreover, it feels like that my laptop runs a bit faster now.

I’m not sure why it takes a long time for Windows Defender to load up, but I assume that in addition to initialization logic, its probably doing some preliminary security scan. I wander if other security software is doing the same thing, although my AVG doesn’t seem to take that many resources on start up. Anyway, if you have Windows Defender installed and having Windows startup performance issue, I highly recommend you to disable it and opted for a better and more efficient security product.

RWendi