I finally got fed up with the amount of time it was taking to boot my laptop. I rely on Hibernate most of the time, but it was just out of hand and worst of all…invisible. So I did some spelunking in the registry and found out exactly what was going on.
If you’re running Windows, check in your registry under the key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
And see all the things that are silently getting launched at startup that you didn’t even know about…
You can delete them, but it helps to know which ones are worth keeping. Here’s the thing you’ll need to know what to remove:
http://www.lafn.org/webconnect/mentor/startup/PENINDEX.HTM
I did export the nodes for that key before messing with it, just in case.
It turns out that a lot of software makers are now tucking in these little CPU-sucking gems to make sure that they check for updates to their wares, or worse. Real Player, QuickTime, MS Money, and others.
The other good place to look is in your services list and set to Manual all those which really aren’t needed at startup. So you wait a little at run-time for them to come up, but I’d rather do that on an as-needed basis.
Final note: Startup time is definitely shorter.