Digital Home Thoughts: How to Speed Up Your Computer Boot Time

"If there's one thing everyone dreads, it's rebooting their computer. It may only take a minute or two, but it can seem like forever. Here are our top 10 tweaks that'll make your computer boot a little faster."

There are some good tweaks on this list, but the biggest factor is definitely switching to an SSD - the change is significant. That hardware costs big bucks though, so the second most effective tip on this list is to run msconfig and remove programs that load at startup. You'll probably find at least half a dozen that have wormed their way in there over time. If you have iTunes or Zune installed for instance but don't connect a player to that computer, you can disable the "helper" programs that load at startup to detect the connection of said players.