When my system starts up it takes about 30 seconds to load personal settings.
I have implemented the verbose messages settings, and it seems to stick for about 15 seconds on each of UmxWmp and WgaLogon.
I have tried safe mode but no improvement.
Can you help please?
First of all, I do not think 30 seconds is a long time. This really depends on your patience and how fast the computer was in before. If it was much faster first there must be something wrong now but it has not significantly increased nothing has to be wrong.
The amount of RAM your computer has is of much influence to the speed of it. Of course the speed of the processor also influences it but adding some RAM is much easier. The minimal amount depends on what operating system you have and as you have not stated it in your initial post I cannot comment on this any further now.
Other than that I would just try to decrease the amount of programs starting. For example on my computer Windows Live Messenger has been a real pain, so I just went to its settings and in most programs on of the first options is to disable/enable at startup.
You can also use StartupCPL:
Download this great little start up manager:
http://www.mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml
Install it and it creates a new Control Panel called Startup (no reboot needed). Open the new cp and in the first 4 tabs you will find almost all of your third party software that starts at boot. Don't want one? Uncheck it. Want it back? Recheck it. That's all there is to it.
Your system will love you for it - it will boot faster, use less RAM/pagefile, and run more efficiently by getting rid of all those programs that insist on starting up even though you don't need them to do that.
Do not disable UmxWmp or WgaLogon as they are both important to your system. The first is part of CA Firewall and the second to check if your system has a legitimate version of Windows installed.
Furthermore, general maintenance is of great importance:
What to do if your Computer is running slowly
Thank you for this information. I have stopped three startup programs which are not necessary.
However, I am still concerned about the time that WgaLogon takes to execute within LOADING YOUR PERSONAL SETTINGS. I have removed the CA Firewall and this stops UmxWmp, but WgaLogon is still about 15 seconds.
On our other computer (similar model) the "Loading your personal settings" takes absolutely no time.
We have 4gb of RAM installed and use XP Pro.
Any further advise would be appreciated.
Here is some info I've collected on max ram for XP.
It's a waste of money to install more then 3GB of memory on a 32 bit Windows XP ( or any 32 bit Operating System for that matter) system. Read here for info:
