What are the "sure" methods of reducing windows startup time?
 

What are the "sure" methods of reducing windows startup time?

My bootup speed is annoyingly slow. I know there are a few tips n tricks for reducing the time it takes to reach the desktop from the initial power on.

But what are the most effective of these tricks or hacks?

My details:
Windows XP Home running on a 256RAM, 2.5Ghz P4 laptop (with wireless internet). The computer is used mostly for surfing and P2P.

Use hibernation
 

Most of the time, tell your machine to Hibernate when you want to turn off power rather than telling it to shut-down. Restoring from hibernation is usually faster than anything else.

Of course, this being Windows, you should do a true reboot from time to time to make sure things keep working fine. But doing this once a week might be good enough depending on what you are running. In GNU/Linux, you could probably get by only having to truly reboot when you install a critical kernel patch every few months. In Windows, I'm not sure if the monthly critical security updates will induce frequent enough reboots for system health.

Get more RAM.

Get rid of Norton/Symantec anything.

Look in your Startup folder to see if there are other load-at-startup programs that you can diasble.

Good advice ^

You can also run msconfig and look at the start-up tab to see what other services/programs are running at start-up and which might be hiding somewhere other than the Startup Folder.

And this thread
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=549466
has several other good suggestions.

Check out the Bootvis tool from Microsoft:

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Tweak/S.../BootVis.shtml

Before you use msconfig to disable services, you might want to check this out:
http://majorgeeks.com/page.php?id=12

you can try Microsoft Bootvis to optomize the boot process. It is not longer supported by MS but can be downloaded here: http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=664

From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BootVis)

BootVis is a computer program that allows end users to check how long their Windows XP machine takes to boot. It was formerly a Microsoft product[1], but it is no longer an official Windows XP program. According to Microsoft, the design goals for Windows XP on a typical consumer PC are:

Boot to a useable state within a total of 30 seconds
Resume from Hibernate (S4) within a total of 20 seconds
Resume from Standby (S3) within a total of 5 seconds
The program measures boot and resume times as the time from when the power switch is pressed to the time at which the user is able to start a program from a desktop shortcut.

it can also be used to optimize the boot process. start it, and select Trace->Optimize System. Bootvis is not a miracle worker (all the tips given in the posts above are probably better), but it can help. Microsoft claims that it does not help, but others have reported that it does. See here: http://www.tweakhound.com/xp/bootvis/ for more discussion...

Ron

Try not using windows. Linix or Mac OS X runs smoother and fatster.


Number one Oxymoron: Windows Works

Leave it on or only go down to Standby. I can't remember the last time I actually shut down Windows XP. Cleaning up RAM clutter is taken care of by the periodic BSOD.

Number one lie: Linux runs smooth
Number two lie: Linux is a great replacement for Windows!

Number three lie: Linux works

---

Linux works great if you have nothing to do all day but scour the internet trying to figure out how to get all your devices to run under Linux. The Linux folks have had years to try and get their product in a state for suitable Windows replacement and have failed miserably.

Fallacy number four: There is an increasing selection of commercial desktop applications available for Linux.

If it's not open source, it probably won't be there. While there are credible open-source apps available as rudimentary equivalents, the functionality and elegance of the user interface usually leave a great deal to be desired.

Knot Kto Mention Kthat KThey Kcan't Kcome Kup Kwith Kdecent Knames Kfor Kthem.

LOL.. Classic!

^

The thing is, I respect Linux and the folks that run it. If it works for you, that's gravy. What I don't respect is recommending Linux as a replacement to Windows, without knowing anything about the user and his/her needs. 99% of the time that is a bad recommendation.

Thats not a lie per say. Just two different creatures. I can expect a
Linux(or any UNIX)
box to run for days/months/years reliably and without crashing if you
know what you are doing.

MAC is actually based on UNIX and works very well.


With wihdows, it may make you feel that you know what you are doing..
but thats far from the truth.

WINDOWS itself runs perfectly. You can get XP installed out of the box and it will NEVER EVER hang. 99.9% of all problems on a Windows desktop are caused by poorly written applications, bad hardware, user errors and insuffucient protection against spyware and virus infected files. There is just too much junk out there in application land, just as there is too much crappy hardware.

I can expect an XP box to run perfectly for years without crashing (in fact, I have one machine here that has been up for 4 years now without a single non-natural reboot. It was rebooted a 2 or 3 times only to install a service pack or to move it. This machine was turned on, had an application installed and is still running perfectly.

As for Linux; For the server market Linux is perfect, I run a server farm with it and it never lets me down, but the whole lie that it is a good alternative for the desktop just never seems to go away. We've been hearing for years that it will take over the desktop market, and it just doesn't. Even massive firms like Corel and Novell have not managed to make a dent in the desktop market. I mean, how many people do you know run Linspire at home on their desktop?

The fact that windows allows the spyware and viruses, it
cant be considered a good OS.
And it lets a poorly written application to cause a problem to
the entire system.

I need to use XP (corportate policies) but if I had my way, I would
stick to Mac OS (for the ease) or linux for the notebook/desktop.

profiles and system services
 

I find, that there are just so many system services that load, normally that it takes a while to load regardless.

So, I setup a couple of profiles, one very light profile, and one with some services that I might need for remote access, or other external devices (ipod, etc.) and then one will just about everything the system wants.

The other big killer, is moving a "work" laptop between locations. The network configuration which loads up early, really doesn't like moving between locations. There is nothing one can do to speed this up, it just has to work itself out. This will be found when working with a laptop per se at work, everything seems to boot fine, time and time again.

disconnect, and go home, and it takes forever for the network location to resolve itself. tihs is only for laptop that are in a workgroup/domain situation.

Take it back to WORK and it takes forever again, but then is fine while at work.

I shutdown a bunch of services that are not needed, and try to get the initial load to about 20 or so. then, bootup time is very fast indeed.

Note that I highlighted a bit of your post. That's the key to reliably running any OS. I run Solaris, XP 64, Linux (Red Hat), Vista 64 beta at home and have run many others over the years (AIX, HP/UX, DEC...). There is no single OS that is light years ahead of the others for varied computing needs, so nobody should feel smug about running a certain OS.

The key is to know what you're doing and stick with the set up that works for what you're trying to accomplish. I am writing this on a box running XP64 that's been up for....oh let me look..... 6.5 mos. I rebooted Feb 13 when I loaded a new BIOS update. My Firefox browser is fairly stable but I'll be moving to IE7 at the gold release for XP64. Under XP32 I like Opera and Firefox. Under Linux I like Opera. My Solaris box hasn't been rebooted since Dec '05 (I was playing with leaning down drivers then.)

In regards to the speeding up of startup of XP, BootVis is an excellent recommendation.

start from scratch. backup your personal files then reformat and install windows, drivers, and apps. sure its tedious and could take hours or days but you'll notice the improvement immediately.

i too agree the only surefire way to dramatically affect a deteriorated boot time is to reformat/reinstall. however, since many people customize their PCs, it's not always practical.
i've recently doubled my notebook's RAM to over 1Gb and it did nothing to my boot time whatsoever. it has however paid dividends in other ways.

Good or bad, it dominates the market, and it doesn't seem like anything is ever going to come close to biting away at its market share, Apple has tried since 1983 and hasn't gotten far, IBM tried for years, Next tried, BeOS tried, many Linux flovors tried and all they all failed. We need to face it; Windows is here to stay. Vista will be another huge success for Microsoft.

What I'll do once a week is pop into my startup folder and run entry in my registry and remove everything I don't want, then I'll check my services for unwanted crap. I'll also head into add/remove programs and remove anything I forgot to remove.

Instead of running msconfig, there is a better option if you have Windows Defender. Open it, and under Tools, choose Software Explorer. This will give you the same option to stop programs from running at startup, but provides much more information.

If you are an experienced Windows user, I recommend Registry First Aid and Registry Compressor

You wouldn't believe how much crud I find in folks' registries when I clean them up. Fragmentation of 40%+ and that slows start up like running a F1 car through mud.