Speeding up boot times

[Ruggerbugger]

It might just be my HL2 Deathmatch-honed awareness, but my comp seems to be taking longer to go through the POST these days. This has started me wondering if I can speed things up somehow.

The first thing that's occurred to me is the IDE drive seek that occurs after the first post screen (see sig for hardware). Since I'm using the SATA controller, is there some way of disabling that check without blowing anything up Am I right in thinking that SATA is done through a PCI bridge on this board? Would that affect what I'm trying to do?

Finally, are there any obvious BIOS settings you can think of, that I might be missing, I'm not one for habitually poking around in there, having broken things in the past!

I can post photos of the boot process if anyone needs them.

[autopilot]

I take it you mean before windows start loading componants etc?

You could look see if memory checking is enabled in the BIOS (disable if so). Also disable anything you don't use - LAN, onboard audio, onboard graphics etc.

[cyzmyass]

Yes i just disable all the stuff i dont need too.

[zaphod]

Try running BootVis. It's an M$ application that should optimize your boot time. Defrag first than run bootvis...Click on "optimize next boot"

BootVis

[jonathan_phang]

if you have a decent defragmenter (and trust me it makes a big difference!) such as diskeeper, then you can do a defragment at boot-time, and one of your options is to place all the boot files together physically on the harddisk, so head movement (ie time) is less.

If you dont have this, then goto:

Startmenu > Run ==> then type cmd to get a command prompt.
Then type in "defrag c: -b"

This will defrag all the boot files on c: drive (obviously if thats not your boot drive then change it).

Finally, every now and then you should go to your windows folder and find the prefetch folder. This basically contains pointers to commonly used apps, so that windows can load apps a bit quicker. However, over time, this folder becomes over clogged, so delete everything in it.

Your next reboot will be a bit slower, esp the transition between the "welcome" screen and the desktop, but thats okay. Then just start opening up your most commonly used apps (Word, IE, Outlook, Messenger whatever). Then the next boot will be quicker. Do this everynow and then it should help a little.

Hope thats good for you.

JP

[chriswood_7]

Windows does take a while to boot when the registry fills up or you hard drive becomes defragmented. Get yourself some utilities like TuneUP2005 or TweakXp to defrag your HDD and registry, it really does work. Or you could go to run>msconfig and go the startup and go thru disabling what you dont need etc

Chris

[Ruggerbugger]

Thanks guys, looks like some registry digging is in order. I'll also try Bootvis. Defragging was the first thing I thought of, but I did it not long ago and still have less than 4 or 5% fragmentation. It's probably about time I cleaned out old program entries from the registry anyway.