Clean XP installation - My P4 boots up faster than my C2D!

Okay umm, I'm not reaaaaaaally that picky over boot-up times, but I'm really really puzzled by this. I reformatted both my desktop and my laptop, installed Windows XP Professional SP2 and nothing else, but my desktop with it's Pentium 4 2.4GHz loads up much, much faster than my MBP C2D 2.4GHz.

And when I say much faster, I really do mean it. My desktop loads up XP completely in 15 seconds, whereas my MBP takes almost double the time, around 30 seconds to load it up.

I'm still happy as 30 seconds is pretty fast, but I find it extremely weird how my older and weaker computer does it so much faster. Both of them are clean installs with nothing else added in.

I'm wondering if it has anything to do with the BIOS, since my MBP spends forever in that white boot-up screen before progressing on to the Windows XP logo. On the other hand though, my desktop P4 takes only around 4 seconds to completely load up once it boots into XP, while my MBP takes about 7 - 8 seconds.

 

HDD and RAM.

 

Hmm, well my desktop uses a 320GB 7200 RPM HDD. But the ram is much, much slower. 1GB DDR-200 RAM.

 

yes but you HDD is far slower than the desktop HDD

 

Enough to make a 15 second difference in boot-up time?

 

Probably. Think about it - when booting up, your system is grabbing EVERYTHING off the hard drive. Fast RAM and CPU won't do much if they aren't getting the data they want off the HDD fast enough.
Your system is only as fast as its slowest part, and more often than not, it's the HDD.

 

Laptop hard drives are generally a lot slower than desktop drives; that's probably the reason. Even if the rpm is the same, the 2.5" laptop drive will be slower than the 3.5" desktop drive.

RAM speed won't matter at all because the RAM is about 100 times faster than the hard drive, so the RAM's doing nothing most of the time, just waiting on the hard drive.

CPU speed probably won't matter too much either (within reason), since again everything's waiting on the hard drive.

Amount of RAM probably will make a difference... but only to a point. I don't think that XP can really make use of more than 1 gb at startup (with no apps running) anyway... so 1 gb vs. 2 gb probably won't matter for XP bootup.

 

Also I see no one mentioned the number of devices in/connected to the computers. A faster computer but with many additional peripherals will take a lot longer to boot up than a slower stripped bare machine.

 

Ahhh alright. Thanks for the explanation.