Windows XP machine booting slow

[Ganesh]

Some XP machines take more than 1 minute to boot completely when they are connected to a network. Some time system may freeze after logging in.
Turning off "file and printer sharing" may help to improve the performance with following steps :-

1] On you local XP machine right click on Network Places and select Properties,
2] Right click on Ethernet Adapter connection and select Properties,
3] Uncheck "File and Printer Sharing for Microsoft Networks" and hit Ok.

Thats it. This should help you to fix this Windows XP booting problem

[Ganesh]

Few more Tips :-

Over the time computers get slower for a variety of reasons like unnecessary softwares installed which uses high resources, disorganized files and folders, network sharing and unused network drives, programs which start running on machine boot up etc...
Windows XP have provided some tools like Disk Cleanup, Disk Defragmenter, Backup tool, System Configuration tool using which we can improve performance to a certain level.

According to Microsoft, XP boot time is 30 seconds maximum, that means a normal XP machine can boot within 30 seconds max.

There are many factors to consider like different services enabled on server and start on booting, network drive sharing, your CPU and speed of hard drive, amount of RAM also is important.
You can fire msconfig command on Run menu to get list of start-up programs and Services.msc to get list of running services on server.

Machine should have at least 512 MB of RAM for better performance.

Third party softwares should be disabled and enable it only when require.

Turn off automatic updates and run it manually once a week or month. But if your machine is connected with Internet then you should stay up to date with the latest released security patches, hotfixes.

Periodically defragment your machine hard drives that you are using frequently.

A file may be scattered across the hard disk in several pieces. Performance and reliability suffer with more pieces of files as the drive heads have to search it at different locations.
Disk Defragmenter Utility helps to bring the file pieces into contiguous format and thus in turn increases reliability and performance.

Programs may be started automatically when you start your computer, such programs on your computer typically run all the time, this uses a portion of your system resources that cannot be used for any other task/process.
Verify that any such a program that start automatically on boot truly needed, and if not then stop it immediately.
To determine which programs are running currently, press CTRL + ALT + DELETE >> click Task Manager >> click the Applications tab, you will get the list of all executing processes.
To quit a program, click the Applications tab, click the task / program that you want to quit, and then click End Task.

I will add some more tweaks shortly in this post

[Shoaib]

Thanks Ganesh for this informative post

[Richie D]

Thanks for those wonderful tips Ganesh. It does improve the performance of the PC a lot.