Time spent on the BIOS boot screen

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I would say its your memory causing the slowdown. My desktop takes ages to boot and most of that is the RAM self test which takes a good 5-10 seconds to complete and I only have 2GB RAM. Don't know if theres any way around that.

Grand Admiral

 

First of, you should never disable pagefile. Windows and many programs need it to work correctly. Disabling it won't force Windows to depend only on the RAM.

Have you tried pressing ESC to skip the memory check (if there is one?), if there's no option in BIOS.

 

And do you know why there was this perodic HDD activity? Pagefile is there for a reason; Windows memory management needs it. And did that "idle" activity lower performance in actual use? Also, there are no real evidence that disabling pagefile would increase performance, not in these forums or in the net, actually quite contrary.
But if you are absolutely 100% sure it won't cause any problems... *shrugs*

 

I also have the pagefile deactivated, runnig XP:TE 32bit.

Everything runs fine and noticeable faster and I have noticeable less HDD activity.
I had not a single problem and I use a lot of programs that use a lot of RAM.

I have 4GB ram installed (yes, on a 32bit system) and I had never the problem that I got an out of memory bluescreen or whatever.
So what's wrong with deactivating it? My personal experience is, that it increases system performance, especially on systems with slower hard drives, and if the system crashes, because of the missing swap file, then I still can activate it again, but I don't need it


The bios takes so long and there is almost no way to speed this up on a laptop. But are 5 seconds more really that bad?

 

Here's a discussion on whether the pagefile should be disabled or not when the RAM is 8GB: http://www.microsoft.com/communitie...eed-b28a-229160b0040c&lang=en&cr=us&sloc=&p=1

 

Again, if you know for certain you won't be running programs that require pagefile or huge amounts of RAM (e.g. certain video editing programs), then yes, you might consider disabling the pagefile. However for most people, the possible performance gains are marginal at the most and definitely aren't worth the problems that might arise (e.g. program crashes, BSODs, data losses).
There are also many threads here in Notebookreview about this matter,
e.g. here, here and here...

I would compare the debate about this to the debate about the best block size (ie. cluster size) for non-boot HDD partitions: Some people might like the possible performance gains in certain conditions from setting it larger than 4kB at the cost of some lost disk space and higher fragmentation rate. But for most people the default 4kB is better.