One thing I can suggest is this. What kind of programs do you have running at startup? Do you know what programs you WANT running at startup? Look at what icons are loaded in your taskbar on the bottom right of your screen. Do all of them look like stuff you NEED running at startup?
Many different kinds of programs will (when you install them) tell Windows that by default, they need to load some portion of themselves into memory. If you have a digital camera, the software often wants to run any time the computer starts up, so when you plug in the camera the software responds instantly instead of the default Windows software. You can start these programs manually. Killing the auto start functions does NOT in any way impair the operation of the program itself. You simply arent loading it into memory every time you boot anymore.
Start in your MSConfig program. On your start menu, go to Run and type msconfig in the box. When the System Configuration Utility pops up, go to the last tab labelled "Startup". Look through there and see if anything looks familiar. Alot of them will be undecipherable, but there will be obvious ones as well. Anything that starts with REAL is for the RealPlayer software. Uncheck those. That stuff doesnt need to load at bootup. The software responds just fine on its own. Any other lines that have programs with familiar names, anything you are sure isnt part of your "necessary" setup, uncheck it. And as a hint, you can uncheck every single box on there and the computer will startup fine. But you may disable programs like the anti-virus or firewall that way. Once you shut off what you are sure of, reboot your computer. Now see how many processes you are down to. You can also go through those icons on the taskbar. Run your mouse pointer over them and let the names of the programs pop up if you are unfamiliar with them. Right clicking on an icon in the taskbar usually gets you some options, including a way to shut down the program thats running.
As a last resort, if you see things in MSConfig or anywhere else and you dont know what the file does, GOOGLE it. Just type the file name in the search bar, and hit search. You will usually get hits that will tell you what hte file is and what it does and where it came from. This should tell you if its safe to disable. And remember, disabling isnt deleting. You dont have to delete files (usually) to disable them. You can always re-enable something if you find you want it running after all.
