Windows Start-Up, What to Turn Off to Make Faster?

[RoninEditor]

Hey everyone.  Basically, I'm wondering how to speed up the boot process.  I'm using my four year old computer (P4 2.8ghz, 1gb RAM, ATI 128mb card) and would like to get things going a lot faster, right now it takes just under a minute to boot-up, I've heard that people can get it in about 10 seconds...? 

Here's a list of the start-up programs I have on this:



I did two screengrabs to get everything that I currently have checked.  I'm wondering what the bare minimums are that I can keep checked?

Any help would be much appreciated!




(...in the meantime, I'm trying to figure out why games like Tekken 3 and MK 4 stutter, tons of topics about it that I have to go through, but it's odd, I can run Far Cry PERFECTLY on this same computer! haha)

[massive88]

You are probably safe nuking everything that isnt c:\windows\****

And even those you can probably nuke.  Looks like an hp driver, nvidia color thingy, dunno about the others.

Id just hack off a bunch and reboot, see if you computer can still do what you need it to.  Should only take you a few reboots to see if everything is working right, just make sure you remember what you check on and off with every iteration.

You can definitely nuke any Adobe, HP, and antivirus/spyware stuff that you have going on in there.

Most of that looks like utilities that you dont really need if you arent constantly tweaking your system, which on a game machine you shouldnt be at all really.

[u_rebelscum]

Bare minimums?  Remove the autoupdates, the adobe stuff, the antivirus/spyware stuff, the symantec stuff, messenger, java, viewpoint, quicktime, what the heck is that HP kbd thing?, and probably the AUTOTKIT in the HP folder.

However, it would be better to disable from within each apps settings, or even better uninstall them all the way.

And are you comparing mame games with PC games?  You're comparing apples to elephants.

[RoninEditor]

Thanks for the advice on this, greatly appreciated!  I'm going to try to pull the plug on all your guys' suggestions and see what happens.  My fear comes from a while ago, when I tried doing more than I should and I was having trouble rebooting all together.

Yeah, I'm still kinda trying to figure out why a GFX intensive PC game like Far Cry would run and MK4 is stuttering, like, the 'under the hood' stuff of Mame that I need to get up to speed on.  I saw somewhere where someone said on older version of Mame32 worked for him right away, so I might try that if I can't figure out what's causing this. 

[TelcoLou]

Do a google search for "black viper's win xp tweaks"

I did this on an old laptop and gained ~40MB of ram at startup, and it boots into MameWah in under 20 seconds

[u_rebelscum]

Yeah, I'm still kinda trying to figure out why a GFX intensive PC game like Far Cry would run and MK4 is stuttering, like, the 'under the hood' stuff of Mame that I need to get up to speed on.  I saw somewhere where someone said on older version of Mame32 worked for him right away, so I might try that if I can't figure out what's causing this. 

Mame is an emulator.  It emulates the original hardware.  It is not comparable with PC games.

Your PC isn't fast enough.  For a very very very rough estimate on what you need, add all chips on the original hardware speed together, multiply by 50 (can vary between 20 and 200, though).  Remember it's very rough; a C2Duo 2 Ghz is about the same as P4Duo 4 Ghz, 32 bit mame usually runs slower than 64 bit mame on the same hardware, and the rest of the PC system and mame settings do make a difference.

Anyway for MK4, the estimate is (50 Mhz + 16 Mhz) * 50 = 3.3 Ghz.  This estimate is low (for P4s), as the video and half the sound chips are ignored.  OTOH, a C2D overclocked to @ 4.4 Ghz ran mk4 on 64 bit mame, so it's pretty close for Core 2s.

[Jdurg]

A good analogy is translating languages.  Tekken 3, MK4, etc. were written for the hardware that the games ran on.  That was one language.  Farcry was written for modern PCs and their standardized hardware.  That's a different language.  Modern PCs don't "speak" in the same manner that the arcade boards did.  So MAME is busy trying to translate all of that "language" from the arcade PCB into a language that the computer understands.  The faster the chips on the arcade board ran, the faster MAME has to translate them in order to keep up.  Therefore, the CPU speed that you need on your computer is MUCH greater than the chip speeds present on the arcade PCB.

[RoninEditor]

Ahhhh... that makes sense with the language analogy.  And the math with the MK4 is great to know as well.  Sorry I'm such a noob in this 'under the hood' stuff! 

I'm trying to do all my prep work until my hardware arrives... tackling Mala at the moment, I'm sure I'll be back on regarding that, haha.

 

[TOK]

TelcoLou's advice is right on... There is much speed to be gained from disabling unnecessary Services.
Primarily using the Black Viper guide he mentioned, my computer goes from off to the front end in about 30 seconds. Before the tweaks it was at nearly a minute and 30 seconds.

I didn't totally strip it because I still like to run occasional PC games on it or move stuff around on the network with it.

[Jdurg]

Ahhhh... that makes sense with the language analogy.  And the math with the MK4 is great to know as well.  Sorry I'm such a noob in this 'under the hood' stuff! 

I'm trying to do all my prep work until my hardware arrives... tackling Mala at the moment, I'm sure I'll be back on regarding that, haha.

 

Not a problem.  It took myself quite a while to fully understand why a game with a seemingly low CPU speed took a massive amount of CPU speed from my computer to emulate properly.  I think a good ratio being put into place now is to take the combined chip speeds of all chips on the PCB and multiply that by 50 to get a good idea of how fast of a comuter you need to run it properly.  So if a game has a single 200 MHz CPU to emulate, you'll need a 1GHz CPU to emulate it at a good speed.  Now add in multiple 200 MHz processors and various other MHz sound/video chips and you'll see that it can take a lot of power to emulate these things.

[headkaze]

Also take a look at BootVis.

[RoninEditor]

Thanks everyone, this is gonna be of great help... had no idea these softwares were available!