Get rid of all the old drivers.

[Neutron]

If you have been using the same computer a long time, and upgraded, used different peripherals and so on you can benefit from getting rid of tons of crap that windows tries to load every boot up.

i was finally fed up of waiting for the little bar thing to cross 22 times before XP booted.

Press [Windows]+[Break] to bring up the System Properties dialog box.

Select the Advanced tab and click "Environment Variables".

Click "New" below System Variables .

type devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices in the Variable Name
and 1 in the Variable Value.

Click OK and OK again.

Open Device Manager button.

View Menu | Show Hidden Devices.(i had to reboot to make it show)

Expand the various branches and look for greyed out icons, which indicate unused device drivers.
To remove an unused device driver, right-click the icon and select Uninstall.or press delete

If you have the video card greyed out and iths also the same as the one you are using (maybe you got a new motherboard) do NOT uninstall it or you will uninstall it for the one you are using as well (nvidia stupidity, maybe ATI as well)

and obviously dont uninstall things that are just not being used at the time like cameras or ipod etc.


after i did that windows bar thing only gos by 8 times on boot up.
check out all this USB cruft, the system devices was just as bad. 2 of almost everything.
plus old hard drives, hard drive controllers, sound and network cards etc etc.

[netguyjoel]

will do...thanx!

[eric]

Good idea.
It should reduce the size of the system hive.
I had a machine once, that upon adding a new hard drive, blue screened. The system hive had grown beyond the maximum size allowed for. I had to do some tricky stuff to get around it (Win2K). I think they fixed this in XP but it takes ages to scan and interpret it during system boot, if it is large.

Thanks, Neutron.

Eric.

[irrelevance]

Thank you!