Whats your boot up time ?

[Thenasty]

starting from the flick of the switch to the front end menu.
It took my machine 15 seconds.

Who's got the fastest boot up time here ? Wanna share the secrets ?

[SpamMe]

About 45 seconds :/ (Winxp pro SP1, mamewah as the shell, all unnecessary services off, BIOS set to not scan for drives). Not sure what's taking so long.

I keep it in standby most of the time though, so it takes about 4 seconds to start.

[Thenasty]

maybe I'll setup ,my MOBO not to scan for drives. Maybe that will take off another second or 2.

[barranger]

I remember hearing that if you have a network connection and it's set to get a dynamic IP (the default) it can slow down boot time

[Apollo]

About 25 seconds for me WinXP. I keep my PC in standby so yeah about 5 seconds really.

[Minwah]

About 45 seconds :/ (Winxp pro SP1, mamewah as the shell, all unnecessary services off, BIOS set to not scan for drives). Not sure what's taking so long.

Same here...I found disabling a shedload of services has increased my boot time by quite a few seconds - haven't figured out why yet.

Thenasty: what stuff have you done to speed up your boot?  I tried some stuff out on a freshly installed XP machine the other day and could still only manage 30 secs or so.

[Thenasty]

About 45 seconds :/ (Winxp pro SP1, mamewah as the shell, all unnecessary services off, BIOS set to not scan for drives). Not sure what's taking so long.

Same here...I found disabling a shedload of services has increased my boot time by quite a few seconds - haven't figured out why yet.

Thenasty: what stuff have you done to speed up your boot?  I tried some stuff out on a freshly installed XP machine the other day and could still only manage 30 secs or so.

I guess I left out the important thing. I run my cab purely in DOS.

[Hoagie_one]

i was gonna do the dos only thing, but i cant find dos drivers for my machine.

[RayB]

Until recently I had decent boot time. Now, I get a BEEP on the "Welcome" screen and it sits there for eternity before moving on. How do I find out what it's doing on that Welcome screen and beeping for?

~Ray B.

PS: It's XP pro

[barranger]

Event Viewer might help.  Right click on My Computer (Win2k and XP) and go to manage

[jerschwab]

If you want to improve your boot up time, a good way to do it is streamline your Windows shell.  To do this you can use programs like Litestep, Aston Shell, or a slipstream utility called nLite.

Any of these options should improve your boot up time...

Litestep:
http://www.litestep.net

Aston Shell:
http://www.astonshell.com/

nLite:
http://nuhi.msfn.org/

Personally, I tried Aston Shell, but couldn't get used to it.  I dropped that like a bad habit.  I prefer the slipstream option because it removes a whole bunch of useless windows things that just slow your computer down and are unnecessary.

nLite is the program that helps you create a custom Windows installation CD without the extra stuff you don't need.  Visit the forums over there and you will find all the information you need.

Good luck!

- Jeremy

[hunky_artist]

y'know when you have your computer in standby, what does that keep running.. the hard drive? how long can you safely keep it like this.

or is it like hibernation on a laptop, where it does actually shut it down, just with a quick save or something so it can load up quicker?

[Minwah]

I guess I left out the important thing. I run my cab purely in DOS.

Heh, that makes a difference

But some people were posting boot times of LESS than 15 seconds in XP here a while back...goodness knows how  

[danny_galaga]

wow, some of you have really fast times. mine is about 45 secs to the menu. but this is win98se on an athlon 2000!! you'd think it would be a tad faster. the only thing in the startup is mame. shut down is great. about two seconds and thats using a macro that has a one second delay built in! (",)

[Silver]

Trimming boot speeds can be a bit of a fiddly art, and bit of luck.

Removing/disabling as much hardware as possible speeds up things, as the OS initialises everything it detects. Most Motherboards these days are very integrated - Audio/Lan/Floppy/Ide/Raid/USB/Parallel/2xSerial/Ps2 is standard. If you don't use it - disable it in the bios (e.g. Floppy/1xide/raid/serial/paralllel/ps2 are often unused). This prevents the OS loading the driver and waiting for it to initialise the hardware. Having said that, XP performs this task much faster than previous windows.

Also disable the killer services - like Indexing, system restore, windows themes, any anti-virus, networking stuff (unless you need it!). Set you windows paging file to one size only (ie same min and max) so it doesn't waste time resizing it.

Once you're happy you've slimmed it all down, run a defrag - boot up is massively harddisk dependant. Using a fast hardisk as your boot drive makes the world of difference - a 8meg cache 7200rpm Hitachi or 10k WD raptor affair, while more pricey, boot noticeable faster than a generic 160 gig drive. They tend to have firmware optimised for desktop use as well, so these drives can even outperform high-end scsi drives on bootup times as scsi tend to be optimised for workstation applications.

And finally - keep booting. XP auto-optimises bootup and application starts after set intervals (read up on BootVis on the MS website) so you should find things improve (slightly) over time anyway.

Of course, there is always PLAN B:  ;-)

Buy a "HyperOs HyperDrive III" from  http://www.hyperos2002.com/

These badboys are basically ram harddrives - apparantly you can install XP from scratch in under 5 mins on them. They are also silent. You could buy a 2gig version and use it as a boot drive.

[flampoo]

My PC is so fast that before I hit the power button it jumps to life. I'm running a MS-DOS Kaypro 286i with a 8MHz intel 80286 and 512 KB of RAM. Yeah, I know what you're thinking... "SLOW DOWN!"

[Minwah]

Removing/disabling as much hardware as possible speeds up things, as the OS initialises everything it detects. Most Motherboards these days are very integrated - Audio/Lan/Floppy/Ide/Raid/USB/Parallel/2xSerial/Ps2 is standard. If you don't use it - disable it in the bios (e.g. Floppy/1xide/raid/serial/paralllel/ps2 are often unused). This prevents the OS loading the driver and waiting for it to initialise the hardware. Having said that, XP performs this task much faster than previous windows.

Also disable the killer services - like Indexing, system restore, windows themes, any anti-virus, networking stuff (unless you need it!). Set you windows paging file to one size only (ie same min and max) so it doesn't waste time resizing it.

Done all of this, but it didn't make much difference to my cab PC, other than slow it down.  I ran BootVis, and disabling services is definately to blame - I'll have to try and find out why...

Once you're happy you've slimmed it all down, run a defrag - boot up is massively harddisk dependant. Using a fast hardisk as your boot drive makes the world of difference - a 8meg cache 7200rpm Hitachi or 10k WD raptor affair, while more pricey, boot noticeable faster than a generic 160 gig drive. They tend to have firmware optimised for desktop use as well, so these drives can even outperform high-end scsi drives on bootup times as scsi tend to be optimised for workstation applications.

I should probably do a defrag, I have a Maxtor Diamondmax 9 7200rpm 8meg SATA drive.

And finally - keep booting. XP auto-optimises bootup and application starts after set intervals (read up on BootVis on the MS website) so you should find things improve (slightly) over time anyway.

Cool

Of course, there is always PLAN B:  ;-)

Buy a "HyperOs HyperDrive III" from  http://www.hyperos2002.com/

These badboys are basically ram harddrives - apparantly you can install XP from scratch in under 5 mins on them. They are also silent. You could buy a 2gig version and use it as a boot drive.

Pretty cool...it would be nice not to hear any HD noise...

[Thenasty]

you would still HEAR HD NOISE because 2GB is not enough for  all the ROMS  

[mp2526]

you would still HEAR HD NOISE because 2GB is not enough for  all the ROMS  

from their site

Unlike the HyperDrive II (opposite) which only took on board RAM. The HyperDirve III provides 8 DIMM slots, each of which can take DIMMs up to 2GB in capacity (no on board RAM). So max capacity is now 16GB.

but at $698.25 I'll pass

[Minwah]

So max capacity is now 16GB.

Exactly, and even in 2GB you could fit a shedload of games.  For the price it's not worth it imo, but very interesting nevertheless.