How can I increase the startup speed of my computer?

That’s the same thing as asking an old man to get up quicker than he usually does.. It just doesn’t work.

defrag your hard drive, uninstall software you don’t need, purge your system of old driver fragments (Driver Cleaner PE), disable autostart of unneeded programs at system startup (start>run> enter msconfig, go to the “startup” tab), prevent system services you don’t need from being started automatically (start>run> enter services.msc , search on the internet which services you can safely disable)

^^ the msconfig is the real timesaver.

All above are good answers. Run ccleaner. Also, consider reinstalling windows.

Follow @ragingloli ‘s advice. All those programs you downloaded and installed probably asked i f you wanted to autostart and/or add a desktop icon and you probably zoomed by that screen which had an OK default (just like you, and most everyone else zoom by the T&Cs)....you are now paying the price for all those autostarts. Clean out those you rarely use. The programs will still be there when and if you need them. See ya….Gary/wtf

Leave it on.

Like @ragingloli and @larsalan said, clean up your startup programs. That’s going to be your best bet. As for programs like CCleaner, I’d be careful. Especially if you’re going to use the registry cleaner. Registry cleaners are more trouble than they’re worth.

Get an SSD for your OS like I do, boot time is about 20–30 secs max ;)

Walshy

@Walshy – Sorry, but what is an “SSD”?

Solid State Drive

@Bri_L
a solid state disk. a hard drive without moving parts, which is faster than normal hard drives.
they are also expensive and completely overblown for an old pc.

@PrancingUrchin and @ragingloli – thanks! You don’t want to know what I was coming up with.

Upgrade your ram if possible. It worked for me.
You may remove any start up programs that gets loaded when computer starts. There are couple of programs that do this, but you can do it yourself. Go in Start->All Programs->Startup, you’ll see there. Remove those you don’t need to get loaded at start up either from settings/options in those particular programs or remove them directly from start up. Right click on startup and say Open, it’ll open a window from which you may easily delete/add the programs (to add copy shortcuts of programs and place them in this folder).
Look in the tray at bottom right of your screen, remove un-needed by above method.

Install ubuntu :)

You may want to check out a program called Startup Delayer.
I’ve used it for a while now and essentially, it does what it sounds like. It delays the start up of designated programs that don’t necessarily need to start when you start your computer. You give the program a certain time to wait to start and lets the computer focus on your more important programs at start up.
BTW, if I remember right, it’s free!

Run “Comodo registry cleaner” – free – see Google.
I’ve had no problems letting it clean problems it finds.