Every time you turn on your computer, it has to load and initialize all of your computer hard ware. Keep in mind: Your computer has a lot of devices that you do not always use. These extra devices are loaded and initialized during every boot. When it does so, your computer's perfor mance is slowed down. Windows XP is now a lot more efficient and smarter during the boot-up cycle. In previous ver sions of Windows, the system would load one hardware device driver and then load another device driver in a series. The only problem with loading the hardware this way was that it could slow down the boot dramatically if one hardware device was taking a long time to initialize. One well-known culprit of this is the network card which pauses to wait to get an IP from a DHCP server. Windows XP has a new way of initializing the hardware devices when the system boots up. Instead of loading the hardware device drivers in series, it now loads some of them in paral lel. This allows the boot t...