How to speed up Vista boot time?

Wait wait and you reformat its STILL around 70 seconds? Thats insane, we have nearly the same exact PC and when I reformat I get 12-15 seconds of startup time.

I realized when I get the long boring black screen...my hard-drive light is on max and it doesnt even blink (indicating lot of activity). But I have only used ~30GB on this drive, recently defragmented and its 7200RPM. Weird...

On another note, the M4400 scored 896.4 / 900 on a recent passmark test

 

Yeah... it's confusing.

 

70 seconds is really long, how about hibernate mode? instead of shutting down, hibernate and see how long it takes to resume?

 

I was googling stuff, and I saw a post in another forum saying to use TuneXP's feature of rearranging boot files in optimal order. I was skeptical that it'd work, but now it's at 51 seconds from 67 seconds.
So that's a considerable improvement.
Approximately 9-10 bars pass by on the progress screen.

 

That is the same thing as Defragging Bootfiles which I thought you already did?
Did you do the msconfig trick? And advanced options to use both cores to boot up?

 

Well the concept was the same but the TuneXP one made a 16 second difference while the other one made negligible difference.
Yes, I selected both cores.
Thanks for your help McGrady.

 

Glad that you cut your boot time considerably. Still a wonder why your time is so high, especially with your specs.

 

You know, the only conclusion I can come to is that the boot time must have more to do with simply the HHD, CPU, and RAM, and that the boot must have something to do with the GPU speed? :S

Just a guess but it seems like we've ruled out the others

 

Ha. No. My GPU is crap. My CPU is also crap. Only thing decent is maybe my 3gb ram and I get a 25-30 second boot. :O

 

TuneXP does absolutely, positively, beyond a shadow of a doubt NOTHING that the built-in defrag functionality of Vista. See the link in my signature line below for details. I dissected its actions on an XP machine using Sysinternals tools to find out that it's claim to some super secret defrag was a lie. All it did was use XP's built in functions.

Gary

 

The only way this could possibly happen, is if the Boot file timing info was incomplete when you ran the defrag batch file. TuneXP does exactly the same thing as the batch file.

Gary

 

51 seconds sounds pretty good, but something is still off and I believe its a hardware issue.

When you did the clean install, did you also install all the drivers for your computer? When I did a clean install on my notebook, some key drivers (Bluetooth, Ethernet, phone line, card reader, chipset) were missing and I had to install them myself. The long black screen/green bars may be when windows is searching for drivers.

Check Lenovo's driver website for your notebook and compare it the Device manager and ports on your notebook. Green question marks or yellow alert symbols are obvious signs that you have some "unknown hardware" on the notebook, but some don't show up at all (bluetooth and chipset for me).

 

Ok that may be true. But I did not lie when I said Vista's function didn't work, and TuneXP's did. I also would have no reason to lie.
*work as in, show a discernible change in boot time.

 

I have all the drivers.
Device Manager detects everything correctly with no warning symbols.
I install chipset drivers first after a clean install, and bluetooth drivers were installed as well.

 

I still don't get what part of the flashing blackscreen you are talking about that last for a long time. Is it the blackscreen after the orb or before?

 

Black screen before the orb.
The black screen time has reduced a lot but still not that short - maybe a little over 5 seconds.
The longest time is now just the progress bar screen.

 

Ohh that screen. How many bars pass on your progress bar screen?

 

I meant to differentiate with the black screen after the progress bars but before the orb and also the progress bar screen. Previously, just the black screen took a while, but it seems other things and suggestions from you guys has reduced that.

About 9 or 10 bars pass by now.

 

Didn't you say you had a 5400RPM drive? That would also affect boot times by around 20% (about 10 seconds in your case.) Check out some benchmarks comparing 5400 vs 7200 and you'll see the difference.

Here's a benchmark I found after a quick search:
http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/vol.23/23.01/2301laptopharddrivespeed/index.html

My boot times are 35-50 seconds, but I have a 7200RPM drive.

 

I get about 6.5 bars and the stupid black screen. Somebody has to know how to lower that, because it lasted for <1.5 seconds before...

Im on a 7200RPM.

 

Yes, it's a 5400RPM drive. I suppose I will invest in a 7200RPM drive, but I have an abundance of 160GB 5400RPM 2.5" drives haha.

 

5400 RPM for me. Haha. If I can find a video cam I'll post a vid of my boot up.

 

Haha... thanks for adding to the mystery McGrady.

 

Haha seriously, my crappy specs are killing you guys 8]

 

Yeah that's extremely bizarre. You should be among the slowest. Did you use v-lite to slim down vista or something?

 

Nope. Didn't even do a clean install either. lololol

 

I just learned about vlite. How much faster will it make my bootup time as opposed to a clean install w/o vlite?

 

Ok here is my vista boot up!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnMVsBzvfZM

 

Yeah... that's pretty fast. Do you count the bootup time from the moment you click reboot from Windows or from when the laptop powers on?

 

Laptop powers on, I should of done a cold boot.
Shut it down, then press the power button to turn it on. And start counting from the moment you press the power button.

 

nang wallpaper btw LOL

 

I have a cold boot time of 30.77 seconds (from pressing the power button till the desktop shows)... I haven't disabled any services but I do have deactivated a few programs from starting up. But from a cold boot I have 85-89 processes 2 minutes after the desktop shows and everything has loaded...

You can see my specs. in my signature...

 

In that case, it takes my laptop about 40-42 seconds to boot up. I was using that little .vbs script that I guess starts from when you press "ok" and the laptop shuts down, powers off, and then powers on.

 

Why would you count the shut down time in a boot up? Haha. Have your laptop turned off. Then you press power on and start counting.

And thank you jisaac lol.

 

Haha because I figured that people were using the same script as me. I realized I got the script at another forum, Vistax64.com or something, and I thought everyone was doing the same thing.

The laptop shuts down fast... in less than 5 seconds, but then there's a slight pause after the screen powers down to being able to see the BIOS start up.

Well I suppose the difference is not that bad then. I can live with it.
Still, I suspect there's some additional stuff I can do to reduce the progress bar screen.

 

my vista boots in 20 seconds but then again its a computer lol. I disabled all startup programs in msconfig... but using msn so much i just re-enabled it

 

McGrady,
When you said you removed drivers, do you mean you removed drivers from the DriverStore\FileRepository folder?

 

I didn't remove drivers, I just disabled the ones I don't use like Webcam, CD Drive, etc.

 

Just turned my laptop off for a couple of minutes since it heats up a lot when its plugged in and charging. The 90 degree room temp here doesnt help either.

I turned it back on a experienced a 12 second boot up time .

 

Haha nice...
Well the one good thing about my laptop is that it doesn't really get hot. The bottom gets warm at best, but I can barely feel any heat from the keyboard even after being on a few hours.

But I do wish I could get 12 seconds. Or even under 30 haha.

 

Well if you are really getting 40-42 second boot times then that is really great. Its equal/better than my boot times. Oh and fyi I didn't disable services on my laptop so I could improve my times.

 

Sorry, I never meant to suggest that you lied. But I am telling you that TweakXP does NOT, I repeat does NOT, do anything except to call the built in functions of Vista or XP. It has no code of it's own that pertains to defrag. I spent a lot of time tracking this down, because Les and I wanted to get rid of TweakXP from the Vista thread. TweakXP had some other things in it that could be VERY damaging to a Vista system. Hence the need to get it out of the thread.

Gary

 

Not necessarily true. For the same size drive, you are absolutely correct. However, a higher density 5400 RPM drive can easily outperfom a lower density 7200 rpm one.

Gary

 

Zero. Just using vlite will make no difference at all. Now using it to remove some components might make a difference. But then you risk the issue folks had when SP1 came out and vLite users had to reinstall those components before they could apply SP1.

Gary

 

If these little "pearls of wisdom" are an indication of your understanding of Vista and its features, thanks but no thanks. Looks like a nother site chock full of tweaks, by someone who thinks he knows more about operating systems than the folks who right them.

The three undelined items above are totally false.

Gary

 

Not only that, his website is full of bad information and terrible advice. Les took much care and advice in putting together his list. This guys stuff is GARBAGE.

Gary

 

*sigh* I hate when this argument comes up, because it makes the uninformed take a second look at 5400 RPM drives because they think that they are faster!

When, actually in reality you are not comparing apples to apples. Comparing a 320 GB 5400 RPM top of the line HD to a 100 GB 7200 RPM drive isn't a fair comparison.

If you were to compare equally sized drives however, you would be able to tell obviously that the 5400 is not near the speed of the 7200 (although the 5400 does win on cost)....

 

I'm getting 40 sec from the time I push the On button till the Side Bar's Clock and Calendar pops into view, that includes log in time and my slow typing................

 

Yea he just said that and you re-enforced it

 

Chief, that's great, but this thread is about originally helping me and anyone else experiencing slow boot times although they've tried the major tweaks/tricks.