​How to Improve Your PC’s Boot Time by Almost 50 Percent

If there is one thing that is highly characteristic of new PC systems, it is how fast they boot up when you turn them on. However, as weeks turn into months, you will start noticing that your PC doesn’t startup as fast as it used to be, and the annoyance increases with the increasing boot time. In fact, computers that take as long as full three minutes before finally displaying the desktop are fairly common.
If you are troubled by your PC’s slow boot time, then here are a few things you can do to improve the experience:

1. Change the BIOS Settings

Tweaking the default settings of BIOS can also reduce startup time. For instance, you can move the boot drive to the “First Boot Device” position in the menu. If there are other boot devices that you don’t use, such as CD, USB, etc. you can disable them as well. Enabling Fast Boot option also allows you to skip on several tests (mostly unnecessary) that your system runs at the time of booting.

2. Upgrade Your Operating System

If you are still using Windows 7, or god forbid Windows XP, then perhaps it is time to upgrade your system. While Windows 10 is an obvious choice to go for as it’s the latest OS released by Microsoft, if not that then you should at least upgrade to version 8.1. You will observe a huge difference in the system performance.

3. Install an SSD

This may not be the cheapest option on the list, but it sure is the most effective. Solid State Drives are much faster than your traditional hard drives. A number of benchmarks published show that by switching to an SSD alone, you can reduce the boot time by almost 50 percent.
Although SSD are indeed more powerful and faster than the typical drives, they can be quite expensive. Thus, instead of investing in a large capacity SSD, you can get a starter variant (120GB or 320GB perhaps, or 1TB), and make it the primary drive for your PC. While the data transfer rate will be largely unaffected this way, the boot time will surely improve.

4. Disable Startup Programs

Irrespective of whether you are using an SSD or not you can always benefit from disabling unwanted startup programs. These are the programs that the OS launches when you boot your computer. If many such programs are enabled, then the system can take a long time to start. Fortunately, disabling these programs is easy. All you have to do is launch the task manager and select “Startup” from the menu. Here you will find the list of the programs that are “enabled”. You can disable those you don’t need to use often, or don’t mind starting yourself later.
Depending on the number of programs and their startup impact you can easily save up to a minute or more on the boot time.
If all the above tricks won’t make a difference on the speed, we suggest that you replace the computer.

Other tricks which can boost the speed of your PC include:

• Adding more RAM;
• Disabling unused hardware;
• Removing unnecessary fonts; and
• Changing boot menu timeout values.

As far as your cloud backups are concerned, remember that if your computer is faster, your backup jobs could also be processed faster and get completed quickly, giving you more time to focus on other tasks.