Three minutes may not be an untoward amount of time for Win2K to boot on your machine. That depends upon what drivers and services it's loading much more than the kind of stuff you're probably talking about. Services can be prevented from starting automatically by going into the Administrative Tools' Services applet and setting them to Manual or Disabled. (Disabled is not usually a good idea.) But don't go in there and just start turning stuff off. You really need to know more about the OS before you do that. At the very least, follow a Win2K tweaking guide if you decide to do this. And do yourself a huge favor, disable items one-at-a-time, then reboot and test the system's functions before proceeding with changing the next setting. Disabling most services will NOT improve the performance of the system by much if any, though it may improve the boot time. On the other hand, if you break a lot of the operating system's functionality, what have you gained?
Much of Win2K's slowness in loading is caused by the fact that it loads drivers sequentially instead of in parallel. The only thing you can do about that is to go to WinXP.
You can control some startup processes (some of them are user mode and some aren't) by installing MSCONFIG.EXE from a Windows XP machine or by installing
Startup Control Pane by Mike Lin (or a similar utility). Even in WinXP I use Lin's freeware utility because it's more elegant and versatile for this particular purpose than MSCONFIG is. But even here you should consider carefully what you're disabling and whether or not you're going to make that setting permanent. Proceed with caution.
- Collin
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