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What is your boot time?

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Curt:
Well, I have taken my new Vista into use, and so far it is even worse than I feared :-(

And, regarding the subject of this thread, my Vista is slow! The reason could be the two 500 MB discs edited: drives, I don't know. But at each and every Start  I will first have to press F12, and wait at least 10 seconds for the next window, where I am to hit Enter, to start booting into the right drive. Only then will Vista begin loading. This will happen at a moderate speed, nothing impressive there, I think, considering that only a handful of programs yet have been installed. The hole procedure is taking about 1½ minute, which I think is very slow, remembering that Brandon can reboot Vista within 25 seconds, and 22% boots in less than 30 seconds.

Maybe I will have learned to like Vista at about the same time Win 7 will be launched, edited: as I learned to like XP at about the same time as Vista was launched...

Darwin:
That's interesting, Curt. Vista is quicker to boot than XP Pro for me... I did mess around with some settings to perk it up -don't remember what I did though! I used this blog posting from Ed Bott as a rough guide, though. I haven't timed my boot time with Vista, it HAS slowed down over time (getting on for five months) but is still brisk. I should take a look at it and see if I can perk it up, but it's well under two minutes (my XP machine is a second under two minutes as reported by BootlogXP) and I am not really that bothered by it.

Curt:
- thanks for link, Darwin. One must admire Bott's persistence to improve on these machines. I am looking forward to read the full story at http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=429

On top of this (small) time issue  I told about, there is this other micro detail: there is no hotkey button on my fancy wireless keyboard, to remote-start Vista. There is a 'sleep'-button, and some media player keys, but I will have to (almost) crawl around on the floor, to start the machine. What an annoyance, such a minor detail can be! Well, I guess the exercise may do me good...

Trying to get to learn Vista, is of course a major task for me right now, but I realize that I have made it more difficult for me than necessary  because I upgraded to Firefox 3 at the same time - one really doesn't have to make life harder than it already is. So in order to ease the burden, I've installed X-Setup Pro and am tuning Vista into a more familiar XP-ish behaviour. My square brains can only handle so many changes at a time ;-)

Darwin:
Heh, heh - Curt, you linked to the article I was talking about  :-[ THAT"S the one I worked my way through. Anyway, not sure what to suggest about the keyboard issue - I suspect that the solution would be to go with a wired keyboard OR, as I do, simply set your computer to go to sleep rather than shutting it down. If you want it to reboot, select restart from the power options first thing in the morning... Alternatively, you could look into whether or not there is some Vista setting or third party utility (I'd check my keyboards driver as a first resort) to see if the wireless connection can be set up to be maintained when the computer is off. I'm not sure what that would do to your battery life, though (although I essentially do this by setting the computer to sleep rather than turning it off, and I get months out of two AAA batteries).

city_zen:
Where was I when this thread started?!?!  :P

I'm sort of a "boot time junkie" so I try to minimize it as much as I can. Not that I reboot very often, but I hate having to *wait* for my PC to start

Anyway, I've just finished reading all this thread and thought about giving my 2 cents on the subject

MS Bootvis, which is not supported by MS since XP was released, can do this for some users, but I have found that it cannot complete its goal if you are running a dual core processor, which I am.
-J-Mac (January 30, 2008, 11:27 PM)
--- End quote ---
Are you sure about that, Jim? Because I'm running a dual core CPU and Bootvis runs just fine  :huh:

A few tips that I've found do decrease, in some cases noticeably, startup and shutdown times:

- Check your (Windows) services. You're most likely running more services in Automatic mode than necessary. The ultimate reference site to find out which services are really needed is Black Viper's
- Make sure you boot from your fastest partition and try to keep it small and defragged
- If possible, try to assign your PC a STATIC IP (<- This one really made a difference in my case) instead of letting it get a dynamic one assigned by a DHCP server (probably a router or another PC)
- Defrag your prefetch folder (<- this one also noticeably improved my start up time). The simplest way is to run
--- ---defrag.exe c: -b from the Command Prompt (replacing "C:" with your boot drive letter if it's not "C:")
- Use Bootvis to see what's going on during boot time and identify executables and drivers that might be causing unnecessary delays
- Use Autoruns to prevent a number of unneeded programs from running at startup (I mean do you *really* need the "Java online update program" to run on EVERY boot?)

By using all of the above (and maybe a few others that I can't remember now) I've been able to bring my system down to a very fast 45 seconds total reboot time, measured from when I press the green restart button until I can see the desktop wallpaper again (I'm using auto login since I'm the only one using this PC). Not bad  :)

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