Slow windows down? (A little article)

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Any computer user that's owned and installed software onto their computer knows that the more you install, the slower the beast runs. Most also know that it's not just quantity and that what you install plays a large factor in how slowly your computer runs. The aim of this article is to find out what types of application slow down a computer the most. I'm going to be measuring the“speed” as the time it takes to shutdown, restart and get back to desktop (with auto-login) and start an application in the computer's start-up settings. The Process To make sure the tests are fair, I installed XPSP2a Professional (release1) onto a Microsoft VirtualPC 4 (sp1) virtual machine and cloned the hard disk images for each test I'm going to run. Each VM will be running on its own,without any other applications running on the host operating system except notepad, so I can record the results. To measure performance, I'm going to be using Microsoft BootVis, an application to time the load-times of each element of the system so users can remove the offending items or otherwise disable things that are taking too long. BootVis will tell me how long the system takes to boot from start to finish and I shall deduct the time the fresh install takes to boot. I will then have a percentage delay that each application adds to the system. I'm going to run each test three times and take the mean to eradicate any discrepancies. What Should This Show Us? By seeing how much the text install slows down compared to the clean install, we have a clear metric to see how much damage one application is doing. This way you can best judge what to not install (if you can avoid it) in order to keep peak performance on your computer. Spyware and Viruses During the course of these tests, it's highly likely that I'm going to pick up spyware from one of the applications. This could affect the results but this is true to life. There is no detection process for these tests, and most things will have been scanned, but be aware.