Improving my boot time before windows loads

I've noticed my motherboard sits for around 15-20 secs after power up. The logos appear, along with cpu speed, but then it takes 15-20 secs before the memory speed info pops up, and then the long list of IDE stuff appears and then windows loads.

I have a feeling the bios is investigating my USB hard drives during that delay. How can I teach it not to? It's a gigabyte ex58 ud4. The only boot drive at present is the Hard disk, and I sometimes boot from CD. How can I teach it to ignore all other drives and hopefully speed up boot time?

Thanks

Go into the BIOS on startup (press delete I think on that board just after powering it on).

Ensure none of the IDE disks are set as "auto" - change those that aren't drives to "none"

Make sure you haven't got USB boot enabled - that can take a while

Also, specify the boot priority to be your primary HDD first

Hopefully that should help.

Nice one. I had already set all the IDEs to none (except my hard drive and cd drive) but on your suggestion found the USB Storage Function and disabled that. Now it doesn't hang around. Thanks for the tips!