Windows XP Bootup Time

[Oldjim]

This is my first XP machine so I have nothing to go on but I have seen other reports of very fast bootup times.
With XP Home SP1 - no login as single user - it takes approximately 60 secs for a soft reboot and 90 secs for a cold boot up to the Windows welcome screen.
Is this normal as it does seem slow to me.

[Noogen]

mine takes about 20 seconds

[Oldjim]

Partly solved my problem using Bootvis. Creative joystick driver was failing due to lack of resources???
As I don't use that I disabled it and reduced the time to 29 secs for both cold and soft reboot.
Bootvis shows
However it shows drive write caching is disabled although according to the device properties it is enabled.
However the time still still seems high and it seems to spend a lot of the time with disc read at relatively low IO levels.
Update
From Bootvis
Time to boot complete 34 sec cold boot, 25 sec warm boot.
Most of the time seems to involve driver (15.5 sec warm 24.5 sec cold) and prefetching (16.3 sec warm 25.5 cold) occurring simultaneously

[Pleasure]

The best thing to do is always to disable unneeded services and programs autostarting first. For example, if your machine is not part of a lan and not used as a server you only need 7 services being started automaticly instead of the 20 enabled by default.
http://www.purepleasure.de/users/ple...servicesxp.jpg

The next step is to go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Run export the key and then remove everything not needed... and believe me, there are many entries without any use at all. Driver entries from nVidia, Ati, Creative or Realtek for example. They look important but most machines don't need them. Quickstart and Autoupdate entries like the ones created by Quicktime, Real, MS Office, Sun Java and so on can also be removed.

[Oldjim]

Thanks for your help.
I just tried deleting the prefetch file and rebooting several times. Now with prefetch enabled I get a time nearer 22 secs from cold to welcome screen which is great. I assume that the prefetch file had collected a lot of garbage along the way.

[Betty]

Black Viper is also a great place to find information on WinXP.

[cadaveca]

Originally Posted by Oldjim

Thanks for your help.
I just tried deleting the prefetch file and rebooting several times. Now with prefetch enabled I get a time nearer 22 secs from cold to welcome screen which is great. I assume that the prefetch file had collected a lot of garbage along the way.

consider the prefetch folder to be you pagefile. like prefetch says, all the files have been "prefetched", and put into a mode that windows does not have to retrieve ther program and write it to the pagefile. As your prefetch folder gets larger, it is naturally going to take windows longer to find that file. So regular deletion of the contents of this folder will hlep kepp your system fast. Of course, the first time you start a program, it will seem a bit slow, if it hasn't been prefetched. Next time you start it tho, all should be back to normal.

go to c:\documents and settings\(your username)\local settings
delete the contents of the temp, history, and temporary internet folders. Leave the other folders alone. Delete temp folder contents in the windows system folder. Delete prefetch folder. defrag, and reboot.
look for system file defragmenter...will slow down your boot by about a second or so, but will make windows faster by far, as windows does not defrag the pagefile, registy, and quite a few others. do this every few days(or daily as i do) and your system will always start as fast as a fresh install.

Need more optimizations? Let me know!

[Gizmo]

Be careful of deleting just ANYTHING in your temp folder. A lot of (IMHO) badly written installers (including many versions of InstallShield) store their uninstallers there. What this means is that if you delete the installer from the temp folder, you may have a problem later with uninstalling an application. This can usually be fixed by installing the app again, and then immediately uninstalling, but that only works if you still have (and can find) the original install disks or install program.