I have a beaut program that does the same thing for XP, cleans up
all the registry crap. The problem is that Windows is designed to drown the registry in all the crap, unlike the *nix systems.
The Toshiba wasn't mine, one I was cleaning up for someone else, and I did clean a LOT of crap out of the registry too. They have it back, now, and are surprised at how fast it goes, NOW. And also pissed - they thought to save $50.00 that the local e-waste people charge for taking away old electronic gear, so they asked me if I wanted the computer, I did.
1 three year old P4 2.4 ghz system took four and a half minutes to boot into XP Home Premium. I cleaned up the registry, took out all the crap, and got it down to two minutes. Then bumped the RAM from 256 MB to 1256 MB and a 256 MB AGP graphic card instead of setting aside 64MB system RAM for the graphics - the bloody thing flies now, about 65 seconds to boot, and when I swap the drive to boot into Linux, it's booted in 35 seconds. The previous owner is now super pissed that they listened to a neighbour and bought a new A$3,000 system when a few hundred dollars of parts would have fixed it all up.
Me, I'm happy with a new tower system that flies, and that's gonna be for my games and other stuff.
