The startup is considered the time from when you see the "welcome to windows" blue screen to when all the icons have appeared on your desktop, your start menu bar appears and ideally your hard drive light stops flashing. I say ideally because we all start opening files and running programs and even though the computer is a little slower to respond, we know why. It has not finished loading everything it has been instructed to.
Now the problems occur when the above is happening, but we are still waiting, whether it is for the desktop icons, or the start menu bar. If we tried to click the shortcut to an internet browser or open word, we are left waiting.

Keep in mind when installing new software that if you are given an option to add to startup, remember how many others have been added and choose whether or not you want to add the program.
The good news is that we can do something about. If your computer started fast and is now crawling along, we know that the problem is not hardware related but how we have our copy of Windows configured.

We have two options here in order to resolve our slow XP startup problem:
1. Manually configure the startup ourselves
2. Buy software that can do this for us

Whichever one you choose, you will still have to go through the list to see what you want to start when Windows does.

Option 1 – Manually configure the startup | Step by step:
1. Start >> Run
2. Type "msconfig" (without the quotes)
3. Second to last is a tab called "Startup)
4. Here you will see ALL the programs that load with Windows.
5. Go through the list and uncheck the ones you do not want to load
Please note that with some programs, to make sure that they do not load with Windows you will have to edit some values in the registry. Unfortunately due to the registry being particularly fussy, I will not go into that here.

Option 2 - Buy software that can do this for us

If you decide to buy software to this, it will be safer for you as the user and more stable for Windows as the software will do all the necessary changes to make sure that no program starts with Windows again until you go back and modify the settings.

There are many software's available to do this for us, I would not recommend that you buy a specific software just to do this. You can buy what is called an All in one or AIO. These software titles have the startup manager tool incorporated within them and a vast array of other tools too.
So why do they have so many tools?

To cut a long story short. The process of speeding up your computer does not solely depend on the cleaning and organizing of your startup programs.

All Computer Cleaning Software titles have the ability to do this efficiently.