Question For El?????

hey el, hear that you know how to speed up a computers boot up time, and mine takes about 2 minutes to completely boot, what do you think i should do to speed up this thing, i dunno whats wrong, my dad has an 800 mhz dell and it takes about 20 seconds to boot...whats the deal?????

I am not el but I will add my thoughts here.

There are several reasons that computers take time to boot. Among them are the hardware items that must be recognized during boot up and the software that is loaded as Windows starts.

You didn't say which OS you are running. I will assume that you are running Win98, WinME or WinXP so that I can give you a hint. Go to Run in the Start menu. Then type in "msconfig" in the box that pops up after you choose Run.

Click on the "Startup" tab in the Window that opens. Notice how many programs are checked. All of these start when Windows starts. You may uncheck some that you don't need to have running in the background. Many of these will be seen in the Tray which is next to the clock in the taskbar at the bottom of your screen. If you have a whole lot of little Icons in the Tray chances are you can ditch a few.

Experiment by turning them off one at a time and rebooting.

Some that you may not want to turn off are listed on web sites that help with this very question. If I have time I will search for some of these sites and post below. You don't want to turn off your antivirus program and/or your firewall.

The other major category is hardware recognition. There are some tricks there, too. If you are handy with BIOS changes you can disable the ports that you don't use (unused serial ports) and stop the BIOS from looking for IDE drives that don't exist.

Disabling or setting these hardware devices to NONE can sometimes save boot time.

If you are running WinXP there is a utility to shorten boot time called bootvis.exe. It only works with XP. It can be found at:

http://www.microsoft.com/HWDEV/fastboot/

Here is a site for optimization of Win ME. I don't think you should turn off system Restore even though it is a hint mentioned here:

http://members.aol.com/AXCEL216/me1.htm

i am running win2k professional.....so what do i do with this???
i have all the ide cables that are not used set to not installed....i havnt turned off the serial ports though, i turned off RAID, onboard sound, usb port, wake on lan...the cpu is at stock speed (133x10) what do you think it is

... Well Win2k is notorious for a slow reboot..

What operating system is your dad on?

I don't think you can speed up Windows 2K bootime.. Haven't seen it happen.

he has winme

buy my old 350 mhz dell with win2k starts up faster...so it has to be able to be done......WHERE ARE YOU EL????

I have found that of all hardware devices connected to a PC, that LAN cards cause the most major of slowdowns during boot. I don't know why for sure, but I suspect that loading the IP stack and then searching for the rest of your "Network Neighborhood" is the cause. I can time drastic differences when I boot a computer that is connected to a running LAN and the same computer when it is not connected to my LAN. It takes longer to boot when NOT connected--like it's looking for the rest of the LAN that it 'expects' to be there. I also note that it takes longer if you are using DHCP (where the computer is asking for a server to assign it an IP address) than if the computer has a fixed IP address.

Just a thought--heck, I don't even know if you have a LAN card installed in your computer...

if you want SPEED.............choose XP.............. you will be in desktop within 45 seconds if you have a lot of softwares in your computers..................no question to ask...............money back............buy me a BUDWEISE.......beer.............if your XP ROCK

yea when i first got my computer it had ME on it it would boot in like under a min easy

now that i upgraded i would say high end of a min 1:15 or so ill have to time it next time just the nature of the beast


but i figure it makes up for it in stablity if you dont have to restart every freaking 12 hours then you save time just by default

there is a topic over at toms hardware on speeding up the bois im sure might help ( it couldnt hurt)

okay the first thing I would do is get new drivers for everything sometimes the drivers can cause you a major slow down in booting. I have every M$ OS and win2k pro on my p3-800 boots in about 40seconds. I would also flash your bios as this has a lot to do with boot times. Are you logging in to a domain? you get SP2? do all these things and see if your times improve.

After you do all that defrag the harddrive! that is always a big one.

Its usually networks that slow down the boot time..

When I had win9x after a long time with it.. It would just temporarly freeze for 1 min then load into the desktop.

you wanta see what is taking u so long go and RUN your "boot.ini"

you will see an enrty that looks like this:

[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect

modify it to look like this:

[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect /SOS


Just add the /SOS at the end after fastdetect

then reboot, watch and see where it is hanging, because two min is too long.