Speeding Up Your PC's Boot Time

I agree that “no boot time” is the best time.

A few years ago I heard that Microsoft was thinking of getting into that TV appliance market. Can you imagine “booting” your TV and taking a few minutes? How about your car, modern cars can have over 20 processors running and I can use my ignition key to get instant start and stop with no penalties. I can even turn it off and on several times in less than one minute and it still works great. There is no such thing as an improper shutdown where you are penalized on the next boot so the situation can be corrected. Has your TV or car ever given you a blue screen? I still get them with Windows XP!

After all these years since the Intel 8088 @ 4.77 MHz and DOS 2.1, we still have to wait a “tolerable” period of time in order to get to work. Has no one figured it out yet?

-doug

One thing that I wanted to ask about is the difference between the BIOS system in Windows and the EFI system for Apples. Does this make a big difference in boot times? It appears to based on the charts, but I don’t know how to quantify that. Does anyone else know?

Heck, my 1986 Amiga booted (from cold power-on) to desktop in about 5 seconds. Most of the OS was in ROM…

Our systems boot in ~100ms give or take, but hey they’re micros and they go to sleep all the time and wake up so that they conserve power.

In my experience in XP’s fast booting:
1- Make sure your Windows’ drive formatted NTFS which is a lot of faster and secure
2- Check MSCONFIG like the author
3- Download and install Start up Delayer ( Google it ). Why ? When you start windows, start-up program’ll try to beat others to get faster start. With Startup Delayer, you can arrange which is starting first ( delay by time ). If you config suitable with your system, you’ll get real faster booting up.
Sorry for my bad ESL
nXqd

Try turning on your light. It would excellent if turning on your OS were almost (1-2 sec) as fast.

Vista users cannot use hibernation/sleep due to a bug that appeared in Vista between the Beta version and the release.

Look for the Windows Vista Beta Performance/Reliability Hotfixes, KB938194 and KB938979.

I boot 4-5 times a day, but it is not due to not knowing how to use
hibernate and sleep. It is due to OS instability. Memory usage creeps up
even when nothing is running, the machine begins behaving oddly, etc,
and a boot fixes it.
Grant on August 2, 2007 01:26 PM

Grant, seriously, what are you using? windows 95?
Vista, XP and even Win2k are MUCH more stable than this. I reboot my vista laptop a couple of times a month. It gets put to sleep when I pack it up to go home each night, and I often wake it up to do some stuff at home in the evenings too. I’ve only had a problem resuming from sleep ONCE.
My XP desktop machine at home is even more stable. It puts itself to sleep after a couple of hours of inactivity, so it usually ends up suspending/resuming a couple of times a day. It gets rebooted every couple of months or so, whenever I install updates.

If you’re using Vista, check out Event Viewer, Applications and Services Logs Microsoft Windows Diagnostics-Performance for a record of how long it takes to startup, shutdown, suspend and resume. Vista will also identify services/drivers that cause these times to degrade.

“I run AVGfree and it doesn’t seem to slow the system down.”

It does slow down startup. Not only that, but it has the annoying tendancy to stop notification area (AKA systerm tray) icons from appearing while its loading. On the rare occasions that I reboot, I let my computer sit at the XP Welcome screen for 30 seconds or so before actually logging in, so that my notification area icons appear correctly.

Yes antivirus like McCaffe or Norton can significantly slow down the system. But renouncing to protection is not the solution.
Use NOD32 or Kaspersky, they are efficient and need little amount of RAM / CPU cycles
Concerning Firewall, I think Zone Alarm is a ressource hog
Since I’ll allready have a hardware firewall, I use “Look n Stop” just for controlling inbound/outbound connection per applications (very light on ressources).

Hibernation work pretty well, on my nlited XP system. And most of the time I use it (I’ve configured the power button to use this by default).

Why did you choose to use PPC Macs as the benchmark? Look at this video on you tube comparing the iMac G5 with iSight to the (then brand spanking new) intel iMac.

The intel boots in under 40 seconds, while the in a minute and fourty. Now, granted, that particular iMac revision totally sucked for boot times. I’m not sure what Apple did to screw it up, but they did it pretty well.

The Macs I work with at work boot from the box (after initial set up) to usable in about 30 seconds. Those same macs with a minimal XP install take about 50 seconds to boot to a login window. (Without being added to the domain.)

When I say a minimal XP install, I mean drivers, and that’s about it.

A developer machine is not the standard, that’s abnormal. What is standard is laptops.

Cullen

“Oddball” sleep/hibernate is what Macs do (well, any relatively recent ones anyway), and it’s awesome. Next time I get a PC I’ll try it’s sleep mode again, but I have yet to get one working right (the closest is an IBM thinkpad, but it refuses to sleep about 25% of the time, and since there’s no indication that it’s asleep once it’s closed up it tends to do a lot of traveling while not asleep and end up places with the “you battery is almost dead” warning up on the screen immediately before Windows shuts it down).

In any case, 2-5 seconds from hibernate is just plain unreal, to the point that I just don’t believe you. From sleep, or “oddball” hibernate, yes, and IMHO not all that spectacular. From true, no-power-until-you-open-the-clamshell hibernate? Not likely.

IMHO, regarding boot times, the flaw here isn’t just the crap that gets put in your “startup” folder; sometimes you want crap in there (well, not the Bonzai Buddy’s and Dell Power Centers of the world, but the other crap that is sometimes actually useful). I like the idea of being able to hit the power button, walk away, and come back five minutes later to a machine ready to go in every aspect (ie, with my applications all loaded in memory). I also like the idea of being able to hit the power button, not wait for all those applications to load, and get to work with whatever I want to do right off the bat.

The solution for me is that the one thing in my startup folder is a little script that pops up a timed dialog along the lines of “Click ‘Stop’ if you don’t want the standard apps to load up or ‘Go’ to load them immediately”, so that when I’m sitting here waiting to be able to do something I just hit “Stop”, and when I leave the laptop sitting there it times out and then loads everything, and in the occasion where I’m sitting here and still want everything to load I hit “Go” and it does.

There’s got to be something like this already sitting around in Windows, right? I mean, there’s not a really easy scripting solution to do this in yourself (although a DOS batch file could get you almost there), but surely someone at some point has decided that all the crapware doesn’t need to be loaded at startup every time. Right?

I have to disagree that antivirus software is not needed today. While the target audience of this blog is not the “average” computer user, I would not give a system to an otherwise computer novice WITHOUT some sort of AV/Firewall. Firefox too if I can talk them into it.

The average user WILL notice the slowdown from spyware more then they will with a nice fresh system that has had AV on it from the start.

Vista by default switches the poweroff soft button in the OS to go into hibernate mode. You have to go change it in the control panel if you really want it to shut off. And on my new pc I just built, I click the mouse and 1 - 2 seconds later, it’s at the logon screen.

The average user WILL notice the slowdown from spyware more then they will with a nice fresh system that has had AV on it from the start.

And that average user won’t get spyware if they’re logged in as a standard user, and not an Administrator (and not the faux Administrator-with-UAC in Vista, either).

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000891.html

Something (somewhat) related is speeding up the time it takes from when I logon to when the OS is responsive.

http://www.radioactivecode.com/?p=186

it is more than the OS boot up! OK, so you are at you’re clean desktop, now add all the load time it takes to get your browser w/all those tabs, your development client (Zend in my case), your IM client (trillian), your file explorer, your music player – loaded. Now you’re in business. you need a beefy computer to get that ALL up in less than a few minutes from cold boot. Sleep/Hibernate looks very friendly considering these applications; unfortunately for me, my PC does not hibernate or sleep very nicely. Usually my AMD quite/cool driver freaks out and keeps my fans at 100% til I reboot IF I use either of those nice suspend-ish features. So I either shutdown, or turn off my screens – all depending on how long I’ll be AFK. Good day!

Heck, my 1986 Amiga booted (from cold power-on) to desktop in about 5 seconds. Most of the OS was in ROM…

I never figured out why Microsoft or some crafty company hasn’t come out with a ROM version… Granted, with all the patches to the OS, it makes things harder, but the Amiga did have patches you would run (in software) to fix the ROM…

My vista laptop (Thinkpad T60) boots to the login screen in about 20 secs. Unfortunately, there is some bug in Vista (yeah, a bug, Vista? no way) that causes me to wait over 90 secs on the “Welcome” screen while I watch the blue circle of boredom icon spin.

Vista “deep sleep” (S3 S4?) is a spectacular feature (the default if your computer supports it). Put the computer to sleep and wake up in 2 or 3 seconds. If you lose power, you’re safe because it also functions like hibernate.

I’ve been using the deep sleep on my home PC for 5 months now, I’ve only rebooted it because Windows Update made me.

Must be nice to have one of the few PC’s that wakes from hibernate quickly.

Through three different work PCs of varying ages and several home systems, I have never had one that woke up nearly instantly from long-term sleep and were ready to use.

My home PC comes closest at a few seconds (probably under 10,and faster than rebooting).

The worst were my old work PC’s, which would take literally five minutes to restore from hibernate.

My current work system, a top of the line for a year ago Dell XPS laptop, still takes 30s to wake from sleep, with no indication to you of how its wakeup process is going (or if it’s even trying to wake up).

All of these systems run no live protection antivirus or firewall (having been fairly locked down otherwise and are behind a router firewall) and run minimal startup services.

I wish hibernate worked, I really really do.