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When you first start your Windows Vista computer you probably notice, as you're waiting for something to happen, your hard drive light start flashing as the computer goes through obscure gyrations in the background. Eventually a screen comes up letting you know that your computer is starting but even that doesn't tell you much. And, even after you're logged in many things still have to run for you to be able to use your system.

And all this time you're impatiently tapping your foot waiting to get to work, surf the web or play your latest game.

If you're the only user of your computer, or you're not expecting anyone else to wish to use the computer soon, there are a couple of things you can do when you leave your computer to allow all of this to happen more quickly. The options there are to place the computer into Sleep or Hibernate mode. These options are available from the shutdown menu.

Sleep mode stores the status of the computer in memory and provides a small amount of power to keep those settings. By shutting down the hard drive, the display and most all other functions of the computer the power usage is kept quite low but the computer can quickly turn those items back on and have you back up and running in a matter of seconds. When the computer returns from Sleep mode your right back to where you were when you left.

Hibernate mode actually turns the computer's power completely off but stores the settings to the hard drive. When next you start your computer it actually goes through the startup process but, rather than logging you back in from the beginning, it brings up the status of the system from the hard drive. Just like in Sleep mode, Hibernate allows you to go right back to work. Since it actually powers the system down, though, Hibernate does take a bit longer to come back up than Sleep.

Another thing you can do to speed up the boot process, and the entire operation of your computer, is to add memory. More memory will speed up many of your computer's operations by reducing the amount of swapping to hard disk required.

For software solutions there are still some options. While most of the things that happen at startup are essential to the operation of your system but there are some things that you can turn off or skip to speed up the initial startup of your computer.

Since Vista is designed to self optimize its startup sequences, as long as you don't make any major changes to your system, change hardware or add software, simply booting the system a few

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