What Operating system to use for fast boot up?

[mamemaniac]

I'm building a Hyperspin setup and was wondering what operating system to use. I've seen Xp tiny and others that scale down the boot up time. What is the fastest boot up system that works with Hyperspin?

[Chris John Hunter]

In my opinion you are best off with XP. with service pack 1. If your not going to be on the net. Then check out registry fixes but you will be pretty quick as you've just installed it fresh. It only really slows down after a few weeks. It is true Microsoft is completely bloatware but when your installed goto start run msconfig. Then take out anything that is not needed will make the booting quicker. Also go into the bios and disable anything that you dont need. If your booting from HD , remove all other devices from the boot sequence. check for other devices, no. If you ever have to you can go in and re-enable them.   There are a million and one so called fixes. Some work some don't. But be careful with TinyXP. Go careful

[Chris John Hunter]

Some of this is good. Some of it is bollocks. I hate Hibernation for example.

http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Windows-XP-Startup-Faster


 

[Howard_Casto]

I know this sounds crazy, but your hardware has a lot more to do with this than the OS.  I've seen both xp and 7 boot blazing fast but their hardware was optimized to boot quickly with that particular OS.  I'm not suggesting that you upgrade your hardware, but it's one of those deals where we could tell you ______ boots the fastest, you install it on your particular machine,  and it's slow. 

Xp is your best bet generically speaking, there is just less stuff to load, but regular xp, not tiny.... that stuff is garbage. 

[brad808]

Make sure you get an ssd drive as well.

Sent from my Nexus 4

[Chris John Hunter]

I know this sounds crazy, but your hardware has a lot more to do with this than the OS.  I've seen both xp and 7 boot blazing fast but their hardware was optimized to boot quickly with that particular OS.  I'm not suggesting that you upgrade your hardware, but it's one of those deals where we could tell you ______ boots the fastest, you install it on your particular machine,  and it's slow. 

Xp is your best bet generically speaking, there is just less stuff to load, but regular xp, not tiny.... that stuff is garbage.

I agree entirely. If you have the dosh, upgrade. If not install a fresh copy of XP.


If you restrict your hard drive to Windows XP, Ems and Roms it should be pretty nippy. Beauty of Mame and this type of retro gaming in general is even modest computers are more than enough to power all the old games.

Of course there are some Motherboards which boot pretty much instantly but then your talking a lot of money.


You could do yourself a favour by having at least 1 gig of ram. If you can 2. IF your not going online then don't go adding any virus protection because that is an absolute killer to start up and speed in general. Also a thought to remember is you can REPLACE Exlorer (windows browsing-desktop/etc) with your chosen Front End thus getting instant access to your gaming system once it has booted. And when you crash out of any of your emulators it goes back to it.

I have XP, I have 1.5 Gig ram and a 80gb hard drive. Its smooth as works for everything I need (Games 1978-2001) and with the odd bios tweak it boots in 25 seconds. Probably get a few seconds off.

You must remember every time you add software you get registery keys being added. A lot of programs use the prefetch option to load part of themselves before the operating system starts- major programs do this, Office does it, Acrobat others. Using vital memory and resources.

N.B: You can hide all the windows stuff very easily on XP so it loads with your image instaid of the XP loading screen and all that.

[mgb]

I'm not sure if win 7 will load quicker than xp or vice versa but obviously having the is stripped of unneeded programs in start up will help.

An SSD will really improve your startup time.

I just built a new pc with Win 7 on an SSD and it boots mucho quick