Compared to its predecessors the speed at which Windows XP starts up could almost be said to be "supersonic". Some of this speed is the result of a new OS mechanism called "pre-fetching". But some of this speed could very well be in your own hands.

There are still ways in which you can increase the speed of the startup procedure of your system. One of them is calling upon the services of the "good old MSCONFIG" utility to remove programs that are being started during OS startup.

Click Start, Run and type msconfig to start this System Configuration Utility.

On the tab labeled Startup you see which programs will be automatically started during system initialization. (The example above only show a few instances being started automatically). Removing items from this list will enhance the startup speed.

The Services tab allows you to quickly disable unneeded (or unwanted) services installed and running on your system. This not only increases the startup speed of your system, but it also makes for a much "leaner" system (running less unneeded stuff) and, more importantly, it increases the level of security of your system, because you’re only running those services that you definitely need and know about.

As an added bonus, on the General tab you have a button to go into System Restore mode, so you can restore your system to some point in the past.

Also see Tips0043 for another way of using MsConfig.