Slow startup

My laptop boots up and then gets to the desktop. Then it seems to take awhile before all the systray icons load and the computer is actually ready to do anything. In general it seems to be performing somewhat slower and worse then I guess I expected it to and I was wondering if there was anything I could do to maybe streamline the startup or remove whatever might be slowing things down. I guess i'm looking more for a software rather than a hardware or Overclock solution.

Thanks!

Silway
Laptop:
Inspiron 1501, AMD Turion 64 x 2 TL-56 (1.8GHz/1MB)
2GB, DDR2, 533MHz 2 Dimm
ATI RADEON Xpress1150 Xpress1150 with 256MB HyperMemory
Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005
120GB 5400RPM Hard Drive

Go to Start - Run
Type MSCONFIG, Enter.
Click on startup tab. Uncheck unneeded items. You can research them online to make sure they arent needed. When done, click apply and close.

Also, make sure that only one NIC is enabled if you have both built in wireless and wifi.

If you go to Network Connections in control panel, disable whichever NIC you are not using (local area connection or Wireless network connection). If both are enabled, it can cause slowness.

yeah, maybe you installed a lot of programs that do run on startup...look also in your taskbar on the lower right pane and check if some of those programs are not needed to run automatically...if there are, just follow bchur83's advice

If you use MSconfig to configure your startup items, you should only use it for testing. Once you find which items are disabled and speed up your startup, rather than continually running in selective startup mode, you should take the necessary steps to elimenate those startup items. You can eliminate startup items in several ways, one is from the startup preferences of the application interface, another is just deleting the shortcut from Start>Programs>Startup, and the other is removing them from the Run entries in the registry.

Using MSconfig should be a troubleshooting tool tho, then once you find the problem you should remedy it, then go back into MSconfig and select normal startup. If you found the problem items and eliminated them, normal startup should work fine.

Download Tune xp 1.5, install, select your boot drive, then click on "memory and file system" then ultra fast booting. Once that's done running, things should be much faster.