I know that the term 'registry' relates especially to windows, but I was watching my boot process, and wishing that it would boot faster (Mint 13, and Mint 17), and the thought that what was scrolling by on the screen looked like an operation similar to the 'registry' in Windows. So I began to question:

There are a number of items in that boot process that really don't relate to my computer, or the way I use my computer, so is there a program that will help me to reduce the number of operations done during 'boot-up' (or better yet do it for me) to the items that really are related to my computer, and/or/ the way I use it?

There's an application called 'bootchart' that lets you see what your machine spends time on while booting but mostly you'll have to get acquainted with that the services are using their documentation and tools like which, whatis, apropos, etc, etc to be able to make informed decisions what to disable or remove and what not.

Registry is really a wrong term for both for the most part. Linux boot process more like autoexec.bat or even before windows would get to autoexec/config.sys.

Linux boot is the nuts and bolts of the system. It is looking to hardware and trying to configure it. Then it may move on to services like tcp/ip and even web servers and such.

Some ideas on how to speed up boot may be...

Parallel the tasks.
Build system specific linux that only has exactly the minimum.
Don't start services during boot or not at all. Can sometimes be delayed by some counter or not enabled to start automatically.

systemD has "bootchart" built in

although the Arch wiki is for well"Arch Linux" it is usfull to MOST distros
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php...ot_performance

the docs are very helpful

now running bootchart will likely show you that the network startup is a bottleneck and takes a LONG TIME

for example on my OpenSUSE 13.1 install my normal boot time is about 40 seconds
( from pushing the power button to typing in my password )

now if i disable "network" on boot i boot in 15 seconds
BUT
i then have to MANUALLY start that to use the web

Well, first of all, you should understand that if you boot without a spash screen you will see a lot of messages from the kernel and then a lot of messages from the init system... Most of them, you might think they have nothing to do with your system but are quite important... Actually, while if you keep digging you'll find you can pretty much do anything you like to your system, there's quite minor chances that something is starting that isn't required to give you a complete desktop experience.. It would be a bad idea and affect the distributions boot-time and performance to provide services that aren't actually required and you should not test disabling or enabling services on your primary OS unless you know how to recover...

P.S. My comment is based on the assumption that you use Ubuntu and you're new to this kind of stuff (hence, your question)

You are quite right, that I don't much understand the system boot up. And I am booting without the splash screen, for the simple reason that Mint does not give any indication of how far it is progressing in it's boot processes, and I confess, I am not a patient soul. But I'd rather wait than mess it up, so I'll go cautiously.

I have noticed that some of Ubuntu's children do boot quicker. Just recently installed LXLE on a couple of older laptops, and they are relatively quick. Also, I've learned that 'suspend' or 'sleep' works really well to just avoid the boot process day after day. But it won't work at all on my Desktop (why I don't know).

All of that said, I recently installed windows on a machine with the idea of selling it. The installation took many times what it takes to install any linux that I have installed, and required constant attention, and when it was done, still did not have enough programs on it to be useful to me. Even the very abbreviated versions of Linux come better equipped by a long ways. And the full install of Linux with all of its accouterments goes a great deal faster.