Rain Man said:
thing is ive always had a slow bootup time since i went from my dual core to my opteron. like i said my superpi score is 29secs and my game load times are amazing.
i might just give up
Don't give up, I'm the master of super fast boot times.
Give me any PC and I will have it sorted in no time. What I'm about to tell you has taken me many hours of research & experiment and lots of fresh installs, but it has all been worth it. This is how I like my rig and it works for me. Read on...
1) Tray Icons & other stuff!
You need to uninstall every junk file and program that you don't use. If you have lots of things in the tray icon near the clock, you have too much crap on your PC. I only have two tray icons: a firewall and an antivirus. Go to the control panel, click add/remove programs and uninstall everything you don't need. Also go to Start > All Programs > Startup and delete every shortcut that has been placed in there (everything in this folder gets loaded, yes you guessed it, at startup).
Now goto Start > Run > and type "Regedit" without the quotes. Press enter.
Go to the following location: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
Just select the "Run" folder, don't expand it. Everything in this folder gets loaded at startup. Delete junk files from here, but leave the essentials like your firewall and antivirus. Be sure that you know what you're deleting, otherwise you might be wondering why a program that used to load at startup no longer does. Here's what mine looks like:
click! In my case, I know exactly what these files are. ccapp.exe and vptray.exe are my antivirus files, and smc.exe is my firewall (both of these get loaded when windows starts up).
2) Background Services!
Have you ever wondered what all that stuff in the Task Manager's "Processes" tab is and why it's there? Most of it is junk, just chewing up memory and resources (some of the services even pose a security threat!
) These are what Microsoft calls Background Services. Most of them are useless and you don't ever need them running in the background. So, how do I stop the useless background services and keep only the essential ones?
Start > Run > type "services.msc" without the quotes. Enter.
OMG, WTF is all this?! lol, don't be scared, it's just crap that Windows runs in the background - well, most of it is crap anyway. Look at the "Status" tab and scroll down - see how much junk is in the "started" state? All these files get loaded when you bootup windows, and they sit in the background eating your resources and memory.
So, what exactly is junk, and what is not? This is where
www.blackviper.com steps in. Oops that doesn't work! That used to be a brilliant site which listed what services could safely be disabled and which services should not be touched. Luckily, many people mirrored his wonderful website and you can still get all the info you need. Here's one site,
MajorGeeks.com. You should read the top bit first. Then, scroll down and you will see a long table. At the top of the table, there are different types of configurations listed (Default, Safe, Gateway and Gaming). Basically, just follow the "SAFE" configuration as this will work for 95% of people. So, just change the status of each service according to what is listed in that table - simple! However, it can take around 15 mins to do the whole lot because Microsoft has put so many services into Windows XP. Now reboot your PC. If you now look at the "Processes" tab in Task Manager, it should look much more tidy and your memory useage should have dropped too. Here's what mine looks like:
click!
In the unlikely event that you have any trouble, just let me know and I will tell you what services to enable. When you become pro, you won't need the table and you will know what each service does and you can then make custom configurations
. Oh, make sure you leave the Task Scheduler service on "Auto" for the time being, you will find out why when you finish reading my post...
3) The bit nobody tells you about - Prefetch!
Go to C:\WINDOWS\Prefetch and select every file in there and chuck it straight into the dustbin. Every .exe file that you execute gets prefetched into that folder by the Task Scheduler service which runs in the background. The idea is that Windows will load quicker (which it does when you have the right files in there, but as soon as it gets built up with lots of useless .exe files, prefetching becomes useless and increases boot time). You know when you're booting up and you see them bars going across the screen before you get to the logon screen? That's when all that crap in the Prefetch folder is being loaded. So, wipe everything in that folder.
However, to get a fast boot up you still need some essential files in the prefetch folder (doh, we just wiped them all!) One
crucial file is layout.ini. There's two ways to get these essential files back: the hard way or the easy way.
The hard way is to open the Prefetch folder and then leave the computer alone for 20-30mins (don't touch anything, don't even move the mouse or you will have to wait another 20 mins from that point). Trust me, this is
dead boring with a capital D. I have done this in the past and it does work. After 20mins you'll see some files being put into the Prefetch folder (that's why I said leave the Prefetch folder open so you can see when it's finished), these are the essential ones, especially layout.ini.
The easy way is as follows: hit Start > Run > type "rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks" (without quotes) but DON'T press anything yet. Go back to the Prefetch folder and wipe anything that has sneaked back in there. Now go back and click OK on the Run screen. It will take a few minutes for windows to build the important files (layout.ini file takes a few mins), so just be patient. To be on the safe side, I just go away for 5 minutes and it's usually done when I get back. When it's done, it should look like this:
click! (Yours might be slightly different depending on what background services you disabled and what programs you have installed).
Prefetch also helps to open programs quicker, so go ahead and execute all the programs you use on a regular basis e.g. firefox, word, winamp etc etc. You will see these being put in the prefetch folder if you have the folder open in the background.
You will also need to reboot 2/3 times to let all your tray icons get prefetched and to allow them to load faster (especially your firewall and antivirus software). But this can be the point where you destroy all your hard work because if you have lots of useless things being executed on startup, they will get prefetched again. That's why steps 1 & 2 above are absolutely crucial otherwise your Prefetch gets ruined when you reboot.
Once you have done that, how can you stop Windows from filling up your Prefetch folder with crap? Easy, stop the Task Scheduler service which runs in the background (remember above when I said don't disable this service just yet? Well, if you had disabled it, none of this Prefetch stuff would be working). So, now that we know what background service controls the prefetching, just kill it. Click Start > Run > Services.msc, scroll down to Task Scheduler and disabled it. You can also disbale prefetch in the Registry if you want to keep Task Scheduler running, google it. Reboot your machine.
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That's the main stuff that you need to do, there are lots of other little bits and bobs you can do, but I'm getting tired of typing this up now. You can get killer shut down times, faster folder access, lower defragmentation on your hard drives, make menus load faster, tweak the pagefile (or get rid of it altogether), make pages load faster in firefox, reduce the size of your windows folder, execute scripts on shutdown to automatically carry out cleanups etc etc, but I'll save that for another time. If you do all of the above on a fresh install...all I gotta say is...DAMN!!!!
If you're really smart, you'll do all of the above, then make an Image of your C drive, so whenever windows feels sluggish, just restore the image and 10 mins later, you have a blistering fast PC again.
I built my rig back in 2002. It's nothing special by today's standards but it was cutting edge back then. Anyway, just by tweaking and playing with windows, my rig is incredibly quick for general use and boots up in 30 seconds which is not bad for a 4 year old rig. My upgrade is due very soon with Conroe coming out, and I can only dream about what I will be able to do with dual core, a faster hard drive and 2GB of ram. Rest assured, I will be tweaking for an even faster boot time
