Speed up the bott process

[Gizmo]

Hey guys,

How can I speed up the boot process in XP? It's not like it takes a whole 5 minutes to boot or anything but it's not exactly speedy fast.

TIA...

[doctorgonzo]

What are your system specs? What programs do you have running in the background on startup? Are you on a network?

[Gizmo]

Look at the ones where it says Computer 2 in my sig. I don't know anymore than that since the computer was built by a friend, who put a password on my BIOS so I can't make any tweaks like enable quick boot or anything like that. There's no floppy drive on the system (grrr) so I can't disable floppy drive seek, obviously. I can look into msconfig but I'm not too sure which files to disable just in case. I have no XP system disk in case I need to format. Aaargh, I can see why it hurt me so bad when my other system got taken away from me. No back-ups for the newer one! But anyway, yeah. I don't think I'm set up on a network, I never created one when we first connected up to the router.

[doctorgonzo]

Do you have more detailed system specs? Hard drive speed, size, all peripherals, brands, types...if you don't know these things, use something like SiSoft Sandra to collect the information.

What part of the boot is slow?

Resetting the BIOS using the jumper or removing the battery for a while should clear the BIOS password.

[edrod13]

I would contact your friend and ask him for the password. There are a couple of things that you could disable in the BIOS. You could disable, the COM ports if you don't use them, LEGACY USB assuming you don't use a USB mouse or keyboard, Parallel port, and as you mentioned the floppy drive. Once you do that someone here at the mech also posted a tweak to speed up your XP boot time. I remember that some members were seeing a significant decrease in boot time. Just do a search. Good Luck

Edrod13

[Gizmo]

What part of the boot is slow?

It get's passed the Mercury motherboard screen, then it goes to the screen that shows how to get into the boot device list and then it hits the black screen, at this point the HD is running madly as it loads, this takes about 7 seconds, then it hits the blue XP login screen, I type in the password, hit the enter key, it then says "Loading your personal settings", that takes just as long as it does when it reaches the black screen before that.

If this means repair my master boot record, that's gonna be difficult, since I have no Xp system disk to do that.

[Cricket]

So, exactly how long does it take for your system to boot up? From the time you hit the power button till the time the Windows desktop is showing? From what you just posted, doesn't look like it takes very long.

Cricket

[Gizmo]

Tha's normal? Hmmm, when I next power up, I'll time how long it takes exactly and post my results here.

[Cricket]

Remember, computers do not boot up instantly. Most of my computers take about a minute to boot up...but most of my computers are much slower than most of the other forum members here. The one in my sig is my fastest computer...the slowest is a PIII 500MHz.

Cricket

[doctorgonzo]

If your bootup time is less than 30 seconds, that is fast.

[Gizmo]

Ok. Well I hope my suspicions about this have no connection to my last post here:- http://forum.pcmech.com/showthread.php?t=105104

[Cricket]

If you're using a computer that has a burned (or pirated) copy of WinXP on it, this thread will be closed by the mods. Discussions of this kind aren't allowed here.

Cricket

[Gizmo]

But from what happened with the installation of the service pack and stuff, does that relate to my boot up suspiciouns? Just that question to be answered and you can close this thread. Sorry about that.

I'm still gonna post back with results regarding how long the boot up takes, but I'll make a new thread for it.