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General discussion

How long does it take for your computer to boot up?

Jun 15, 2007 4:14AM PDT

Get out your stopwatches. How long does it take for your computer to boot up?

* Less than a minute (What's your secret sauce?)
* 1 to 2 minutes (Not bad. Any tips?)
* 3 to 4 minutes
* 5 to 6 minutes
* I can mow my lawn and return, and it will still be loading.
* Other (Please specify.)

Discussion is locked

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Less Than A Minute on my old T3265 emachine !!!
Jun 15, 2007 2:44PM PDT

I use my computer constantly and am all over the web daily, downloading, etc. I keep it extremely clean, minimize start-up programs, scan with most of the recommended free programs, use a firewall for my cable connection, keep the registry spotless and defrag regularly - it all works !!!

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Boot speed unrelated to CPU or drive speed.
Jun 15, 2007 2:49PM PDT

I'm a PC tech of 25+ years that has built about a half dozen PC's for myself and my family, and one thing I've found is that boot speed... despite popular belief... has very little to do with CPU or Hard drive speed.

I have WinXP Pro running on a 4200+ dual core cpu with two high performance SATA drives RAID-0 striped together, and boot up in roughly 2 minutes.

For my mother, I reused my old 3200+ Athlon XP, but the motherboard I reused maxes out at 2200+, so the processor is *under-clocked*, running slower than it is capable. For storage, a single 80GB IDE hard drive. Her boot time is a scant 30 seconds!

The greatest lag in Windows boot time is the number of hardware devices and startup/tray programs installed in your system.

I have two PCI cards, a PCIX video card, 1GB of ram and about a dozen startup apps in my PC. My mothers' PC has only an AGP video card, 512MB of ram, and about 3 or 4 startup apps. No other cards installed, which makes all the difference in the world.

If your PC is booting too slowly, remove any excess hardware AND startup programs that you don't need. Windows XP spends 90% of its boot time pre-loading all of these programs and device drivers long before it ever reaches a desktop.

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Wrong
Jan 16, 2011 12:12PM PST

Wow, how wrong can you get? You've been a PC tech for 25+ years and you've never noticed faster hard drives providing better performance?

Here's the extreme example that proves you wrong. Take your PC and install an SSD as the boot drive. With a 7200 RPM hard drive averaging about 100MB/s, moving to an SSD capable of anywhere from 200MB/s to 300MB/s you're going to notice a boot time under 30 seconds.

Sure, hard drives are not THAT different from low speed to high speed, but they ARE different and you can notice it by pulling out your stop watch and seeing a difference between 5400 RPM to 7200 RPM of about 20%, and of course WAY more if you move up to an SSD. My Windows 7 system is booting in about 25 seconds (cold start) using a Patriot Inferno 60 GB SSD.

The faster the hard drive the lower the boot time.

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how long does it take for your computer to boot up
Jun 15, 2007 2:50PM PDT

actually my computer takes over 3 minutes to do a cold boot. my work around - i just put it in hibernate mode so when i turn it back on it just does the post test then loads up the saved version of the desktop from harddisk in less than a couple of minutes

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under 1 minute..
Jun 15, 2007 2:53PM PDT

29 seconds to the login screen

45 seconds to fully boot (password entered and all) with programs fully loaded and computer ready to go.

The only trick i've really done is the old prefetch trick, combined with using both services.msc and (for the more persistent ones) msconfig to limit what can and can not load on startup. Also, whenever i install a new program i immediately check to see if it comes on at startup, and if so turn it off.

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msconfig
Jun 15, 2007 3:45PM PDT

to get a quick boot, just stop a few startup programs by going to 'start', 'run', type 'msconfig' then select the ones you recognise from the system tray on the 'startup' menu to be disabled until you start them manually [anything you dont need to start immediately on startup]. easy, under two minute startup on a laptop!

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1 to 2 minutes
Jun 15, 2007 4:22PM PDT

The three biggest factors in my fast startup are:
- A finely tuned System (No viruses or spyware), Windows Registry, and a defragged Hard Drive.
- Disabled unneeded start-up services
- Using BootVis boot acceleration utility, made by Microsoft.

Now my boot up time never exceed 90 seconds.

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Not very long...
Jun 15, 2007 4:50PM PDT

My computer doesn't take more than a minute, probably less, because it's Mac, natch. If you're real tired of the sort of foolishness that people seem to associate with the PC startup routine, go to your local Apple store and start one up, they come preloaded with all the kind of software that you're likely to want, or need, and you won't get much older waiting to get to work, or play. No, I don't sell them, or have a whole lot of stock, they're just designed better, to provide a different sort of user experience. It's part of the whole design philosophy, I shouldn't have to tell anyone who hasn't had their head in the sand since the late seventies, when they proclaimed their mission was to make stuff that's "Insanely great". It's a no-brainer!

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Lol, "designed better"
Jan 16, 2011 12:18PM PST

That's pretty funny.

Windows 7 with an SSD (which Macs don't even fully support yet) is 15-30 seconds boot time depending on the computer and the POST routine.

How is it Macs are so much better designed if their o/s doesn't even support functions like TRIM for new technology like SSDs?

Oh well, at least the new Mac laptops will have flash RAM instead of a hard drive. I hope they get a function like TRIM because SSDs can use it.

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55-60 secs....
Jun 15, 2007 5:00PM PDT

I run a 4600+ x2 with a gig of RAM. I started with a boot time of around 90-120 secs. Did the following to squeeze out a lil more time.

1) Turned of some services that I dont use (procexp + services.msc)
2) Do a periodic registry check + compact (registry mech/weekly)
3) Run CCleaner (Weekly)
4) Defrag using a third party defrag util (monthly)

Zonealarm does a scheduled weekly scan for viruses & spyware

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OK, so I cheated a bit...
Jun 15, 2007 5:20PM PDT

My old Compaq Presario has always been a speedster and it got a LOT faster when I upgraded the memory to 2GB. It took about 90 seconds today and I saw there were some things needing attention: installs opening the first time and a need for a defrag. It's back to faster than I can run to the restroom and back. LOL!

Unfortunately, the eMachine is slower than a glacier moving uphill and now that I put the password protection challange up (It's my computer for going boldly where I probably shouldn't go...), it's easily 3 minutes.

But no matter what I'm doing, whether it being booting up or a project, I have a strict rule: NEVER sit and wait for the computer! It needs to be a tool, not a black hole for my time.

Lenny

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i can't agree more Lenny!
Jun 15, 2007 5:28PM PDT

i learnt this the hard way when the booting time for my old P4 rig started increasing by the day. At its worst it booted after 20 mins.
BTW the hard disk crashed the same week (and yes, I had backups on DVD)

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Two month old PC with Windows Vista Home Premium
Jun 15, 2007 6:00PM PDT

My PC is approximately two month old. It takes about 45 seconds to boot. Usually, I don't shut down my PC. Instead, I use the sleep mode. To wake my PC, I only need less than 5 seconds.

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Nice
Jan 16, 2011 12:19PM PST

Very nice boot time for a hard drive.

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Less than a minute...
Jun 15, 2007 6:00PM PDT

It's over four years old, Win XPHome/SP2 with only one re-install, fairly regular dollar injections, keep it clean and tight, use it over 6 hours/day. (Age is because it has taken me that long to think I've learned XP's quirks. And then there comes another oopsie!)

Aloha,

Herb

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Bootup in just under 3 minutes but I have 63 Processes
Jun 15, 2007 6:07PM PDT

I had a Trojan on my Dell 600m Pentium 2.20 ghz, 586 mhz, 80 gig, 2mg Ram laprop and had all of disk wiped clean and my OS and software reinstalled about three weeks ago. I update and run AVG Anti-Virus and AVG Anit-Spyware.

I know I have to0 many processes running but I'm not sure what to get rid of or how. I also have stuff in my startup that doesn't need to be there as I don't use it that often. I don't know what to do about getting rid of these things either so that I can boot/start up quicker.

When I read instuctions on how to speed up my computer, delete items from the Task Manager and startup, I just have this image in my mind of making some horrible mistake which will result in a costly trip back to the repair shop.

Is there a way to capture the list of processes and put them up here for someone to help me figure out what I can delete (and how) and what I need to leave running?

I'm reasonably sure that I can remove Quicktime, Musicmatch Jukebox, HP Digital Imaging Monitor, and Adobe Photo Downloader...if I only knew how.

Thanks for any help!

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Google & Procexp
Jun 15, 2007 6:34PM PDT

I had the same questions as you. Now, I use a combination of Google & procexp - a great utility from erstwhile Sysinternals.

There are some great guides to help you identify and stop unneccessary services that hog system resources.

Here's just one of the zillion out there

http://www.jasonn.com/turning_off_unnecessary_services_on_windows_xp

I would recommend that you do not blindly follow one article. Cross check with a few more forums and then get on with it. If you are paranoid about breaking your system, tuen off one service at a time. That ways even if you do screw something up you know what exactly you need to tuen back on (when you boot in via Safe mode).

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OK, let me qualify my previous response
Jun 16, 2007 2:08AM PDT

I said my primary WinXP machine took 4 minutes to boot. The time to get to the login window is fairly quick, well under a minute. But the times I reported for both it and my Linux machines were the times to get to where I could do something useful. My machine starts up with 39 processes plus 64 services, some of which are painfully slow.

I could set it up to manually load most of those 39 processes, but since I use all of them regularly and I live on the computer, I made the conscious decision a long time ago to not trade off boot time for convenience. Of the 64 services, all are ones I depend on for various things, including keeping my machine tuned up. All of this makes little or no practical difference since I never turn my machine off. Indeed, I depend on some of those tasks and services to keep doing useful work even when I'm not there.

Doing an apples-to-apples comparison between my Windows machines and my Linux machines is tricky. Certainly running "ps" under Linux vs. "msconfig" under Windows reveals that I'm loading a similarly large number of tasks and services/daemons on each platform.

And the bottom line remains the same - from power on to doing useful work takes 2-4 minutes on my Windows machines and under 1 minute on my Linux machines. On a practical level, it's far more significant to me that I occasionally have to restart Windows for no apparent reason while my Linux machines only need to rebooted when I decide to do so (and for some other reason than that the system has become unstable). On the average, I find Windows stays up 2-4 weeks between necessary reboots while Linux stays up for years.

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How long does it take to boot up?
Jun 15, 2007 6:50PM PDT

This is too much like the Larry N. discussion. See Lee Koo's summary of the Larry N. responses.

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My CPU operating system boots up INSTANTLY!!!!
Jun 15, 2007 7:23PM PDT

Any dummy knows that the best way to leave your cpu is on standby for periods of overnight or less. It doesn't even have to boot up. It's still warmed up and ready to go. INSTANTLY!!! Leaving it for a week or more is different. Shut it down. DUHHHHHH!!!!

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1 minute 45seconds
Jun 15, 2007 8:18PM PDT

My tips
First Use a boot manger utility, Startup Control <http://codestuff.tripod.com/> is good and has free trial version, to analyse the programs that are loaded at startup.
Disable the boot startup (do not delete) of those you do not need immediately, they can always be started when you want them.
In particular disable MSN Mssenger|Windows live Messenger from loading at start up as it can take a lontime to connect and meantime your system is waiting to complete loading
Secondly review your security software and settings. The top suites have been getting more and more complex and slow down both windows boot and download speed very substantially. I use a simple Nvidia firewall and Kaspersky Internet Security for antivirus and spyware

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20 to 45 seconds
Jun 15, 2007 9:09PM PDT

Ah, the beauty of a MacBook. Looks good and normally boots up faster than lightning.

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Quck boot
Jun 15, 2007 10:03PM PDT

It takes 65 seconds to boot and that includes typing username and password. The secret, Linux, Ubuntu specifically.

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less than a minute (Win XP 64-bit)/2-3 minutes (Regular XP)
Jun 15, 2007 10:28PM PDT

Once I select an OS my computer is quick -- It's not super new, but I built it myself with fast DDR-RAM and a SATA-150 hard disk. It's all about squeezing as much performance as possible out of the processor (not overclocked). My next project will probably be water-cooled and overclocked (maybe with Tukwila (Intel) or Cloverton (AMD)). I like speedy computing!

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Hibernate!
Jun 15, 2007 10:31PM PDT

I use hibernate on my XP machine. It takes about a minute or so from the time i press the button, until the time the machine is ready to go.

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Just under 57 seconds
Jun 15, 2007 10:32PM PDT

My PC boots up in 57 seconds, but with at least 7 seconds of the Nod32 screen. Still, I can use my computer in under a minute.
I've recently been tweaking my settings thanks to this site:
http://freepctech.com/pc/xp/xpindex.shtml

Also, I've unchecked some programs to automatically start up in msconfig.exe

I have XP MCE, with a 3.4ghz dual core processor and 1gb of ram.

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My PC boots up in 57 seconds, but with at least 7 seconds
Jun 16, 2007 12:00AM PDT

Hard to beleive that this is true if connection to the internet is alos taking place?

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What is unclear?
Jun 19, 2007 8:32AM PDT
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ok I guess
Jun 15, 2007 10:33PM PDT

it takes about 45 seconds to get to the windows login screen and then about 2 minutes and 10 seconds for all programs to load (thanks to scotty the watchdog for disabling startup programs also known as winpatrol) so it takes around 3 and a half minutes to my computer to be completely functioning.

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Under A Minute
Jun 15, 2007 10:38PM PDT

OK. 3 year old machine...originally. Been thru some upgrades. Running P4 3.0 GHZ HT with 1.5Gb RAM Win XP Pro. My primary SATA HDD is 90%full , and I have a secondary PATA HDD.
Less than a minute to useable desktop, but still loading the last of the services. Total processes after boot 53/ 54. 4 of these are Folding at home apps, and cores.

Top tips:

1) DEFRAG REGULARLY. I do it at least once a week, even when the anlaysis says it isn't necesssary, cos it LIES. A PC at work was takin about 30 secs to show the start menu when you pressed the START key. The reason? Never been defragged - was approx 80% fragmented!! Defrag is a PCs best friend! USE IT.

2)Keep out the crapware; yes, I'm looking at you Google toolbar, Yahoo toolbar etc.... Be careful what you install. All too often there is crapware bundled with downloaded software these days. Take your time on the Next button...

3) Cap the pagefile. I'm running a pagefile of 2Gb initial, and Max 4Gb. This is obviously relative to the amount of RAM you have, but I have had no issues with the headroom I allow. The bigger your pagefile needs to be, the longer your PC will take to boot.

More RAM = less pagefile.

My PC doesn't even seem to use anywhere near 2Gb from startup. Only 452Mb right now. Just gotta give it the headroom, cos some apps will soak it up very quickly.

4) Make sure you have eough RAM. I see too many manufacturers of affordable systems that are only able to sell cheap PCs cos they only put enough RAM in to run Win 98/2000 decently. It's not worth sacrificing RAM for system price. A decent PC should have at least 1GB nowadays. Accept no less!