How to speed slow boot up

I recently had to do a system restore due to a file corruption and all my settings were set back two years to my system restore disk settings (I know stupid me). I had everything set by a friend a couple years ago and had a very quick boot up time because he stopped programs from opening up at startup. I am trying to do that myself. I went through the steps in the FAQ section to stop some programs but it really did not help much.

What else can I do to improve this aspect of my computer's performance?

Thanks for any guidance you can give me,

Andrea

 

When was the last time you did a defrag of your computer?

 

I just did that right after I did system recovery so on Tuesday. At least I think I did. Is there something more than that then going into the disk defragmenter in the control panel under performance and maintance, and running that?

 

You need to have 15% free space to get any improvement thru the defrag, if you dont have that, or even otherwise, run the disk cleanup utility and chkdsk before you run the disk defragmenter. Here are some links on troubleshooting a slow system
http://www3.telus.net/dandemar/slowcom.htm
http://www.microsoft.com/AtWork/getstarted/speed.mspx/
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/SupportCD/OptimizeXP.html