Because from rebooting to final relaunching of all apps can take 10 minute, I created a process to automate the whole thing:
I think I restarted my PC somewhere before I went on holidays…2 months ago.
As for ‘booting a TV’ - it’s too late. When I replaced my video recorder with a DVD recorder last year, I was not pleased to find that whereas the video recorder came out of standby instantly and was silent in operation, the DVD recorder takes about half a minute and has an audible fan. And it locks up sometimes. I wanted an appliance, but it’s a lot closer to being a computer.
25 seconds is pretty fast, even my cellphone takes 30 seconds to boot (Linux OS).
But my PC with an absolutely clean install of XP booted in 23 seconds from pressing the power button to being ready to use. But unfortunately an absolutely clean Windows doesn’t do much. I never measured Vista’s loading time though.
Anyway, it is fast, I really don’t regret buying an Epox motherboard.
Instead of running msconfig users in the know can remove the startup registry entries.
Tweak OS settings like disabling system restore, setting a fixed pagesize, increasing system caches, runnign various CPU tweaks, if you haev dual or quad core edit the boot.ini to make proper use of the cores since it’s disabled in XP by default. Stop any services you know you do not need. For general running of the PC disable all the fancy gui fade in fade out animations etc. Disable error reporting perhaps. A nice proggy for tweaking can be useful. I like TweakXP from totalidea.
Get a good hardware firewall and scan the PC using online scanners like Housecall periodically.
My pc has been running for more than a year now and still has less than 25 processes running on a clean boot. FYI this work PC here, booted this morning now has 62 processes running. I mean WTF! 
Also make sure you have paried ram etc but now we are not talking about OS tweaks anymore.
Returning from hibernate off a flash memory device, is significantly faster than any hd based boot.
Why not leave your PC on 24/7?
That’s been my policy at home for the last 7 years or so, and it’s what we do with our 800+ desktops at work.
Like A. Lloyd Flanagan and many others, I’ve had less-than-stellar results with hibernate/sleep solutions. I also vaguely remember reading something long ago (most likely obsolete by now) about booting your computer being akin to starting your car: There is more wear produced during the startup process than running x hours (don’t remember the exact time).
Brent - The last three laptops I’ve had (since 2002) and the last desktop machine I built very rarely had problems with going to sleep or waking up
My laptop battery will run for a week when sleeping, and when I open the lid I have a useable OS again in less than 5 seconds. I couldn’t even tell you the last time either of my machines were rebooted. Its at least a month.
Whenever I read posting like this I think back to an old Verity Stob article in Dr. Dobbs about the “State of Decay”.
This takes a pc from Cruft Force 0 through 10.
Here is a little snippet:
Cruft Force 10. Expiry. Description: Machine only runs in Safe mode at 16-color 800600, and even then for about a minute and a half before BSODing. Attempts to start an app are rewarded with a dialog “No font list found.”
Ordinary dodges, such as reformatting the hard disk(s) and starting again, are ineffective. Cruft has soaked into the very fabric of the machine, and it should be disposed of safely at a government-approved facility. There it will be encased in cruft-resistant glass and buried in a residential district.
John
My cell phone and new TV take too long to boot.
On my XP laptop the login prompt comes up quick enough, but it’s a long time before the system is really responsive. I disabled everything in MS Config and now it’s instant. What I wish for is a utility that could show what is taking a long time - widget X would be useful if it takes a second to start but not if it takes a minute; I don’t want to have to go through and try every one.
I think it’s insane to recommend that people disable or uninstall antivirus software. This is like the people who are obsessed with decreasing the amount of memory in use on their computers – people, processors and memory are there to be used, and there’s no disadvantage to using both for worthwhile processes and causes! I’ll take the cycles that my antivirus software uses up anyday if it means that my computer is that much more protected in the case when vulnerabilities are discovered in Windows or Windows-platform software allowing malware and viruses to be introduced without a user’s consent.
“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).”
Then why do I almost always get a couple of hits when I run Ad-Aware? I surf the net ONLY as a Standard User on Windows XP. I have an Admin account that gets logged into maybe 1 time a month.
Granted, I don’t get AS MANY spyware, but I still do get tracking cookies and such almost every week.
There are a couple of other things too that might help speed up things a little bit:
- Disabling unneeded services (services.msc)
- Optimising prefetch (usually using bootvis, now unsupported by Microsoft, but still worked pretty well for me)
- I-FAAST in Diskeeper 10 allows you to specify files to put on the fastest parts of your HD, coupled with the tuned prefetch file this might speed things up abit.
@Brent:
“Why not leave your PC on 24/7?
That’s been my policy at home for the last 7 years or so, and it’s what we do with our 800+ desktops at work.”
…I’ve had less-than-stellar results with hibernate/sleep solutions."
Well… according to the Energy Star calculator: http://www.eu-energystar.org/en/en_008b.shtml
a PC workstation with a 19" LCD will consume 1,692 kWh/year, if it is on 24 hours a day.
So 800 desktops over 7 years means you have consumed 9,475,200kWh, producing around 919,000 kilos of CO2.
And that is before you look at other costs like other peripherals and all the additional air-con required to keep them cool.
If you only had them switched on for the 8 hours-a-day that they are in use for, then you would only have consumed a third of that.
“My methodology was consistent on all machines. I used a stopwatch, which I started as soon as the first BIOS text appeared on the display [1]. If the system stopped at a logon dialog box, I paused the timing, entered the password or clicked the logon icon, and resumed timing as soon as I pressed Enter [2]. After the desktop appeared, I immediately clicked the default browser icon (Internet Explorer 7 on all Windows machines, Firefox 2.0.0.3 on the one Linux machine) and stopped timing when the start page was fully loaded. I repeated this test for each system until I had three consecutive consistent results and then took the average of those results; I ran the test a minimum of 6 times per machine.”
Not very fair for Linux…half of IE is loaded before he clicks the icon. He should have done the test using fiefox on all the machines.
@Wes:
"Then why do I almost always get a couple of hits when I run Ad-Aware?
…Granted, I don’t get AS MANY spyware, but I still do get tracking cookies and such almost every week. "
Err… because tracking cookies aren’t actually spyware or adware?
The fact that AdAware etc even trap them at all has more to do with marketing and “state-of-fear” factor than it does with any actual threat posed to your PC.
If you don’t like cookies then set your browser to refuse them.
Is there an equivalent to MSCONFIG on Win2K?
Reed
Well… according to the Energy Star calculator:
http://www.eu-energystar.org/en/en_008b.shtml
a PC workstation with a 19" LCD will consume 1,692
kWh/year, if it is on 24 hours a day.
This is exactly why I turn mine off. I experimented four months straight the last apartment I was in. The first two months I kept all three power-hungry PCs on. The second two I turned them off when not using them (except my laptop).
The months I turned them off my electricity bill was $60 cheaper (these are all three beefy, power-hungry machines) which is $20 per PC per month just to operate! That’s almost twice the energy star estimate (which is $130 per year at the rate I was paying electricity). And note that we were getting wholesale electricity prices ($0.08 / kWh).
What I learned:
- I rarely used my power-hungry PCs. My laptop is the primary PC I use for all normal use. I used my power-hungry PCs for gaming (one was my wife’s computer) and other activities for maybe 7-10 hours a week.
- $20 per month for one PC isn’t really that much. $60 per month gets to the point where I have to question why I’m doing it. Why am I spending this money for no good reason?
- If I can do something small environmentally (not waste electricity), why not do it?
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.
I glanced through the comments and not sure if this was directed at me or not (I didn’t see anyone else mention times in waking up), but I never said it came back from hibernate quickly. I said coming up from being asleep was always 2-3 seconds. Just that you had hibernate to fall back on if you lose power.
**
And of course last night I wake up my PC and my on-board network device failed and my resume from sleep took almost a minute as Windows freaked out. Had to reboot to fix. Hopefully there’ll be new drivers to resolve.
I turn my computer on when I get home from work and turn it off when I go to bed. One the weekends, it is on from when I wake up. I personally find my PC’s boot time (from hitting the power on button to Vista Business login screen) to be reasonable.
To keep my computer running smoothly, I try to not install anything I don’t need. I also run as a regular user account instead of running as an Administrator, which I hardly use need after setup is complete.