Diagnose and solve slow start-up problems

When my computer with Windows XP Home began taking 15 minutes to start up, I wanted to find out why. I found that Windows keeps a log of every time some software is loaded, including during start-up. It can be found by right-clicking on My Computer in the Start menu and then left-clicking on Manage. Double-click on Event Viewer to see the different logs.

They were not that easy to read, so I installed Event Log Explorer, which is free for non-commercial personal use and easier to understand than the log viewer in XP.

My particular problem was caused by the Fax software hanging up instead of starting and was, I think, related to software installed with a new printer/scanner. As I never send faxes, I disabled this via Control Panel/Admin Tools/Services, and boot-up time was back to a reasonable two minutes.

Les Bowler

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