No wonder it takes so damn long to boot

[mlalena]

Windows 7 came out days after I finished setting up my Arcade PC.
I had XP 32bit for about a week, and then upgraded to Windows 7 64bit when it came out.
I swore that Windows 7 was taking twice as long to startup, but everything I read said that it should be faster. I didn't want to go back to XP just to see if I was right, so I dealt with it.

Today, I read this article. My all black background was adding 30 seconds to my boot time.
http://lifehacker.com/5451159/solid+color-backgrounds-cause-30+second-login-delay-in-windows-7
I immediately ran to my arcade to verify this, and changing the background did shave 30 seconds off my boot time. WTF.

[ark_ader]

I'm surprised you ran to your arcade machine to fix it. 

What is 30 seconds?

Try TinyXp with less than 30 seconds boot time if so impatient...

[Havok]

So run the hotfix and you should be good, right?

[mlalena]

For now I did the quick fix of changing to an image background to fix the issue.
I'm just mad because I went out and overclocked a Core 2 Duo to 4GHz for the arcade, and it was booting slower than my Pentium 4 computer that I use just for email & web surfing. With nothing running on startup except the most basic services, it should boot in seconds.

I still have other perforance issues that I haven't solved.  I got the dual U360 version of Grid Wars.
On XP it ran great. With Windows 7 it is unplayable. Once there are 20 enemies on the screen my rate of fire drops to 1 shot a second.

[Thenasty]

why fix something that's not broken 

[zorg]

with stok windows, it's quite easy to have some boot speed ups.

disable any services you don't need on the machine.
disable any hardware you don't need, eg don't let OS check and wait for the floppy drive, com ports and so on.
using minlogon insted of winlogon will give you some boot speed up.
bypass exlorer by using your FE as shell

Ho and don't forgot if you have a background image that BMP loads faster than JPG

but yes, as said before whats a few seconds. no card boot straigth away. have you ever waited for a 48in1 or a XXin1 booting ??

[SirPeale]

I'm surprised you ran to your arcade machine to fix it. 

What is 30 seconds?

Try TinyXp with less than 30 seconds boot time if so impatient...

What's with the attitude?  If he wants to shave time off his boot, that's a GOOD thing.

[Deadly]

30 seconds - it's clearly not supposed to act like this so yes it was an issue. And who cares if he hops, skips or jumps to his machine - he was figuratively speaking. Blasting someone for providing resolution is idiotic. What do you think this forum is for?
I for one think it was a very nice gesture to post this info because people will start jumping on the Win7 band wagon and everything out there for launching the FE recommends/performs removing the wallpaper so this was great info.

[Masterful Gaze]

Yeah, I know what you mean. It's not so much that it's booting slow it's that it's booting slower than it should be.

I'm not an expert by any means so take this with a grain of salt. When I moved from XP to Windows 7 I noticed a performance hit. I think that the Directx standard with Windows 7 takes more oomph that Directx 9 that comes with XP. Something else to keep in mind is that you are using the 64bit version of Windows. In a lot of cases running 32bit software and games in 64bit Windows tends to run a little bit slower than running them in a 32bit version of Windows. I don't think there's much you can do to improve performance if this is what's slowing your games down.

[mwong168]

I just changed my work desktop to a background image because I was using black before.  Normally I reboot once a week when I arrive first thing in the morning when I go make my coffee in the lounge so never noticed how long it takes to boot up.  Thanks for the tip anyways OP!

[ark_ader]

I'm surprised you ran to your arcade machine to fix it. 

What is 30 seconds?

Try TinyXp with less than 30 seconds boot time if so impatient...

What's with the attitude?  If he wants to shave time off his boot, that's a GOOD thing.

No attitude intended, I thought it was odd that 30 seconds saved for boot was such a big deal enough to make a post about.

It wasn't that long ago that when you turned on your PC it took 15 seconds just to boot to DOS.

If my Windows 7 machine booted in less than 30 seconds I would be reinstalling it. On average it takes well over a minute with minimal services.

I have a night sky background on my Win 7 x64 machine and after removing it did not acheive any speed increase.

Probably the better response should have been: Maybe the OP should check to see if his drivers are up to date.

[Xiaou2]

 
 The more powerful the hardware, the more the Company's will create software so
Obese / Bloated, Buggy and Unoptimized ...that you will never be able to have a
  "Fast"  PC.

 Why?

 Deals with Hardware manufacturers.

 If a PC operated like lightning, and only an actual computer could tell the difference
in speed between a $500 computer, and a $2000 computer...   Many people
wouldnt upgrade for well over 10 years.

 You have to laugh, when people running BSMS Office on a decked out PC is still
DOG slow on a brand new quad core PC with 8gigs of ram,  a HD with higher
bandwidth and rotational speeds...     As it was when they ran it
back in 500 mhz days and 32mb ram.       What a sad sad joke.

[ark_ader]

 The more powerful the hardware, the more the Company's will create software so
Obese / Bloated, Buggy and Unoptimized ...that you will never be able to have a
  "Fast"  PC.

 Why?

 Deals with Hardware manufacturers.

 If a PC operated like lightning, and only an actual computer could tell the difference
in speed between a $500 computer, and a $2000 computer...   Many people
wouldnt upgrade for well over 10 years.

 You have to laugh, when people running BSMS Office on a decked out PC is still
DOG slow on a brand new quad core PC with 8gigs of ram,  a HD with higher
bandwidth and rotational speeds...     As it was when they ran it
back in 500 mhz days and 32mb ram.      What a sad sad joke.

Not wanting to rub salt to this issue, but indeed my IBM thinkpad (P2-300-128mb) 240 boots faster with Windows 2000 than does my Laptop (Santa Rosa) with XP.  Heck my original Xbox boots 15 seconds straight into my arcade front end and that is a P3!

It goes back to my original post.  I read the article again and incidentally the issue surrounding the 30 second boot delay was in the RC version not retail.  So if the OP is using the RC version of Windows 7, it will expire soon anyway, so I would just use your old XP license on that arcade PC. 

Why are we so much more impatient today when just 10 years ago, we dreamed of 90 second boot times?

Its not just PC boot times, its also waiting in line or slow traffic.

When was the last time you clock watched 90 seconds?  

Let's not even go there   

[IG-88]

Windows 7, it will expire soon anyway, so I would just use your old XP license on that arcade PC.  

Why are we so much more impatient today when just 10 years ago, we dreamed of 90 second boot times?

Why would a person need anything more than xp in a mame cab anyway? Using win7 is like putting a Ferrari engine in a Pinto.

Dreamed of 90 sec boot times? Heck I've had all my OS's from XP on down booting in less than 30. And my 2 DOS machines are up in under 15.

[saurian333]

I thought it was odd that 30 seconds saved for boot was such a big deal enough to make a post about.

Matter of perspective, really.  My Ubuntu machine (as up-to-date as my Win7 machine) boots in 45 seconds, so adding 30 to that would be kind of a big deal.

If you're running Vista on a 2GHz/1GB machine, then it probably takes 5 minutes, and 30 seconds is less noticeable.

The more powerful the hardware, the more the Company's will create software so
Obese / Bloated, Buggy and Unoptimized ...that you will never be able to have a
"Fast"  PC.

As long as you're relying on Windows, pre-assembled machines, and closed-source software, that is true.

[J.Max]

Windows 7, it will expire soon anyway, so I would just use your old XP license on that arcade PC. 

Why are we so much more impatient today when just 10 years ago, we dreamed of 90 second boot times?

Why would a person need anything more than xp in a mame cab anyway? Using win7 is like putting a Ferrari engine in a Pinto.

Because Win7 64-bit performs better with a Core2Duo than WinXP by a significant margin.

[SGT]

No attitude intended, I thought it was odd that 30 seconds saved for boot was such a big deal enough to make a post about.

Wow. Well I think 30 seconds is a lot to shave off for a bootup and nice to give us a head up.  Thanks for the tip, OP   

[SirPeale]

If it were only a few seconds (say...5) this wouldn't be that big of a deal.  30 seconds?  Is it a long time?  Of course not.  But dammit...if I want to play I want to play now.

Let's say this were an actual coin-op product and not in someone's home.  That time is measured in dollars and cents.