I use Microsoft Windows XP Version 5.1 and Norton AntiVirus. When I start my computer it seems to take a long time to get started. I wonder if I have programs that are automatically starting when I turn on the computer? Programs that I do not want to start up. How do I check to see what programs (software) are opening up when I turn the computer on.
To check to see what programs are automatically starting that you might have some control over, try: 1. Click on Start 2. Click on RUN 3. Type in: msconfig and press ENTER The screen that pops up will have a "startup" tab. That is a listing of programs that are automatically starting everytime you boot your PC. Often you can find problems there and disable them, or temporarily stop items like Nortons from loading to see if it will affect your startup time. Note that if you find any malware loading in startup, you can disable it but it may very well "re-enable" itself, so you would need to use another method to completely remove the issue.
If you run Microsoft Defender, under the tools section there is a software explorer. You can see what each of the programs that begins on startup are. Delete from the list will keep them from starting.
How much RAM does the system have? If it is less than 512mb, your system start-up is probably forcing a few programs to have to page out to the hard drive... even though they're all trying to run at the same time. I installed XP on a laptop that I had forgot to drop the second DIMM into... it didn't take long to figure out the mistake.
