
If you run into problems, however, you can turn it back on.įine-Tune Your Registry for Faster Startups Most likely, you don’t need to have this boot delay, so turn it off.
IMPROVE STARTUP TIME XP PC
Boot Delay Some systems let you delay booting after you turn on your PC so that your hard drive gets a chance to start spinning before bootup. When it’s enabled, your system spends a few extra seconds looking for your floppy drive - a relatively pointless procedure, especially considering how infrequently you use your floppy drive. Here are the choices to make for faster system startups: Quick Power On Self Test (POST) When you choose this option, your system runs an abbreviated POST rather than the normal, lengthy one. You’ll come to a menu with a variety of choices. How you run this utility varies from PC to PC, but you typically get to it by pressing the Delete, F1, or F10 keys during startup. You can speed up your startup procedures by changing the BIOS with the built-in setup utility. So, if you speed up those initial startup procedures, you’ll make your system start faster. When you turn on your PC, it goes through a set of startup procedures in its BIOS before it gets to starting XP. In my tests, I’ve also found that after emptying the directory, it takes my PC a few seconds longer to get to my desktop after bootup. So, by emptying the directory, you are most likely slowing down launching applications. By using this index, XP can launch files and applications faster. It analyzes the files you use during startup and the applications you launch, and it creates an index to where those files and applications are located on your hard disk. Windows uses this directory to speed up launching applications. The tip recommends going to your C:\WINDOWS\Prefetch directory and emptying it every week. Warning: I’ve found many web sites recommending a way of speeding up boot times that might in fact slow down the amount of time it takes to boot up and will probably slow down launching applications as well. To make sure that boot defragment is enabled on your system, run the Registry Editor (Hack #83 in the book) and go to: On most systems, boot defragment should be enabled by default, but it might not be on yours, or it might have been changed inadvertently. When boot files are in close proximity to one another, your system will start faster. There’s a simple way to speed up XP startup: make your system do a boot defragment, which will put all the boot files next to one another on your hard disk. Here are several hacks to get you right to your desktop as quickly as possible after startup. No matter how fast your PC boots, it’s not fast enough. Without further ado: Shorten the time it takes for your desktop to appear when you turn on your PC
IMPROVE STARTUP TIME XP WINDOWS
Fortunately, I have permission from O’Reilly Media to republish some of their best hacks and in the book Windows XP Hacks, by Preston Gralla, it turns out that hack #3 addresses just this topic. Great question, and one that I can understand as my PCs also seem to gradually get slower and slower on boot as this, that and the other app have to check in and get updated definitions, apps, data files, and who knows what else.
