Windows 7 boots slow

My computer is booting extremely slow.

It was bought in 2009.
When I bought the system, it had XP on it and I upgraded to Windows 7 a few months later.

I was told that if the drivers were not updated, it could cause the system to boot slow. When I upgraded to Windows 7, were the drivers automatically updated?

How can I find out if I have Window 7 drivers?


Startup

I went into MSCONFIG:

Which of these programs do I not need? What are they used for?

Realtek Voice Manager (I read somewhere to keep this but I don't see why)
HD Audio Control Panel
Intel Common Userface (Listed three times)
Java Platform SE Auto Updater 2.0

Are there things under "Services" that I do not need that will slow my boot time?

I read that defragging the hard drive can decrease boot time.

By default, XP, Vista and Win7 are supposed to defrage the boot sector when booting. However, it is not always set to do so in the registry.

How can I have Win7 automtically defrag the boot sector when booting? Does it slow boot time?

 

No, the drivers were not automatically "updated". If you haven't touched them, then you are still running drivers that were designed to run under Windows XP. In some cases, that's okay, but not all driver software is alike, so a XP driver may not work well - if at all - under 7.

All of those startup items are okay, although you could stand to disable Java updater and update it yourself manually, as well as you could disable the voice manager (who said to keep that enabled and why?). If you don't know what you're doing, I wouldn't advise sifting through MSCONFIG to increase your boot time.

As for defragging, it's not as much of a cure-all as people make it out to be. You can use Auslogics disk defrag to optimize it and move select OS files to the front of the drive for [maybe] slightly faster boot times, but all in all, your startup time is going to be determined largely by the speed of the storage drive primarily, and then by other components secondary. If you want real-time defrag, there are some third party programs that do this, although it's really not necessary and if anything, it will probably be a drawback in performance.

 

what computer is it and what spec?

 

Also, define slow, how much time?

 

Deselect those programs that you have manually installed.
Also it might be due these issues in PC:
- Bad driver
- Corrupt file or volume
- System misconfiguration
- Virus infection
- Corrupt Registry Entries
To fix such type of problem i would suggest to scan your PC with an updated Anti-Virus and fix registry errors by using a registry cleaner like PCFresher.

 

Hmm, you could look through your services, check out any that you think you're not using, and disable them, saving you a bit of boot time. For example, I know I don't use the Fax service, so that's off for me. Google can be really helpful here, since some Services names can be confusing when figuring out what those services do.

You can also mess around in MSCONFIG to try to get some enhancements. In addition to the above posts, you can also disable GUI boot, which helps slightly as well. So, instead of having the Windows square form every time you boot, you just get a black screen between POST and login.

 

There are some fairly robust PC maintenance programs out there, such as Glary Utilities or Advanced System Care - but honestly, you can do a more thorough job yourself without their interface, and many of them you need to pay for in order to receive full functionality. But if you find you don't feel comfortable enough with making your own changes, you can look into a few of them.