Next you should move to the CMOS setup you should make sure that none of the IDE channels (slave or master) are set to auto detect. Rather, for each channel that you know contains a drive, set the drive info to what that drive should be, so that it only auto detects it once, and not each time you start the computer. You will also want to set each channel that you know does not have a drive attached to "none" as this will prevent the computer from looking to that channel for a drive. Another quick and easy tip would be to set the boot sequence to "C:" only. This will prevent the computer from looking to drive A: each time for a disk. Also make sure to disable floppy boot seek if you choose to do this.

Next you should visit the advanced BIOS features/setting menu if you have one. Here you can turn off or on your computer's boot sector virus selector. Unless you are paranoid or more susceptible to receiving a boot sector virus you should set this to "disabled" for a faster boot sequence.

Msconfig

A tiny, somewhat hidden utility aptly entitled System Configuration Utility is a great place to start your Windows tweaking extravaganza. This little program basically has control over most of the aspects of the procedure of booting your computer in that there are a few key files that are accessed during this time. Four files, system.ini, config.sys, autoexec.bat and msdos.sys are easily modifiable to speed up boot time. To run msconfig go to start > run > type msconfig then press enter.

First you'll want to choose selective startup under the general tab. Next you should untick all excluding process system.ini, process win.ini, and load startup group items. Unless you're running virus scanning utilities you won't need to load autoexec.bat as it'll probably be empty anyway. Please take note that the WindowsME and Windows9x versions of msconfig are slightly different. If you're a WindowsME user you will probably want to leave everything except for load environment variables checked.

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