You might be surprised to find that your hardware may be the cause of why your computer boots up slowly. The boot process involves initializing and loading up hardware and their drivers. That is why it is very important to keep updated all your systems drivers. But this may require that you check the manufacturers web sites on a regular basis. You should also verify that the drivers are for the version of operating system you are currently running.

In addition to running Disk Cleanup and Disk Defragmenter to optimize the performance of your computer, you can check the integrity of the files stored on your hard disk by running the Error Checking utility.

As you use your hard drive, it can develop bad sectors. Bad sectors slow down hard disk performance and sometimes make data writing (such as file saving) difficult or even impossible. The Error Checking utility scans the hard drive for bad sectors and scans for file system errors to see whether certain files or folders are misplaced.

The network card of your PC can also present a substantial drain on the time it takes your computer to startup. Enabled network cards take up time locating network addresses. It many network protocols are set up then it can take a significant amount of time for all this to try to connect to load up. If you have a home network set to assign IP addressed automatically you can speed things up by giving your computers a permanent IP address.