As with every year for the past several years, lots of people and families got new computers in their homes this Christmas / holiday season.

Often, especially when there are kids in the family, the computers quickly go from being the fastest on the block to feeling like they're already obsolete as the kids have run around the Internet installing everything they could get their hands on--and a lot of things they didn't even intend to get their hands on.

One of the most common complaints is that, "it just takes too long to start."

This is often blamed on antivirus software--especially when you aren't running the best antivirus software.

Regardless of whether or not the antivirus software is even partly to blame, the real culprit is probably oddles of things set to autorun on Windows startup.

We found a great guide to Speeding up your Windows PCs Startup that's well worth a read. About the only thing not mentioned in the article is degragmenting your hard drive.

Now that decent disk defragmenter is built into Windows, there's really no excuse for not defragging your PC. We'll cover disk defragmenting ourselves in a future post.