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According to Microsoft, and I'll take that with a grain of salt, Windows XP is designed to boot up within 30 seconds. But when you add additional services that can become a minute or two or more. You could probably speed that time up a little bit, but not by much.
Multiple Services
Multiple Services
If you have multiple services enabled and lots of software installed, you'll need more than two minutes for it to boot up. The time of boot up also depends on the speed of your CPU and the speed of your hard drive. You can expect a 30 second boot if you have a 2GHz dual core CPU with 2 gigs of RAM and 7200 RPM hard drive.
Spyware Infection
Windows XP slow startup and sometimes shutdown can also be a symptom of a spyware infection or bloated configuration or both. In some cases, although rare, it can also be connected with device sharing problems like the network drive not being available. This frequently happen to laptops that keep trying to find wireless networks or any kind of network and devices which are usually connected to you. If you have a button on your laptop to disable network, push it and you will have a faster startup. You may open it again when windows is already running.
I don't think is necessary to specify the basic, though I will do it: you need an antivirus, and a good one. I recommend Kaspersky or BitDefender. Use them to remove any virus/spyware that load on Windows startup. Use a full scan.
Amount of RAM
The amount of RAM is also important. Windows XP is not that good at running on 256M PC and Windows 2000 has the edge. Windows XP is more resource hungry and on a 256K PC it feels like it's at a snails pace. 512K is usually okay and if you're running 2G, only a small amount of this memory is used unless you run some major memory hog applications. A good compromise would be probably 1G between cost and speed for modern desktops and laptops with XP.
Spyware Problems
If you indeed do have spyware problems, you can't rely on disinfection. You'll need something like 'Ghost' and clean image to restore Windows to feel safe (Linux based analogs of Norton Ghost are free). Browsing of grey sites should only be done in virtual machine environment, as VM image can easily be disposable. Microsoft virtual machine is free. And if you want to use Linux images, VMware player is also free.
Bloating
Bloat is most likely the second major cause of the slowness of startup next to spyware. In order to access the level of bloat on a PC, you'll need to create the list of services running after booting (before you open any other applications) as well as a list of startup programs. You should print this log and save it as a file as well and carefully analyze it.
Corrupted registry
In most cases, Windows XP slow startup is caused by numerous problems with registries. Without doing anything wrong and using your computer in a regular way, every move is traced on registry: creating documents/folders/any file, browsing the internet, playing game, installing an application... everything! In time your registry is so full of unwanted and corrupted entries, that a scan of your registry would actually make you look amazed: hundreds and thousands of errors on your registry. You wouldn't have time to do it manually, so use a software to clean up your registry and your computer will breath again and run faster.
