How to speed up Vista boot time?

I beg to differ...

 

Here's my two cents in the boot-up matter. I spent MONTH, yes MONTHS trying to FIX my boot-times. For months Les encouraged me to do a clean-install instead of trying to remedy my problems.

Since that time I did 3 clean installs, until I got it RIGHT!! =)

What I believe finally made the difference was the order in which I installed drivers, updates, programs.

Firstly, I made sure I installed the ACHI driver properly during Vista install.
Next, I installed the bare minimum drivers, I think chipset driver was all.
Next, install every blimey Windows Update
Next, install all drivers
Next, install all programs (you may prefer to install a few, and check your boot-times, in my experience certain programs have slaughtered my boot-times)
Finally, use Scud's boot-time Defragger, it's a godsend.

For me, I think the trick was doing the bulk of installation AFTER SP1 was installed, but I made sure everything else was up to date before I started bombarding the OS with drivers and programs. If you have any mapped network drives, those can/will cause boot-up delays as well.

After clean install, my boot time was ~32-37s. Now it's ~40s, which isn't too shabby.

Ciao-time!!!

P.S. Listen to Scud, or you might find yourself intellectually castrated =]

 

Sorry about that, maybe I should clarify. My Laptop was real slow on start up and shut down, and of course it would with Dell's junk and everything else under the Sun.
As you stated you did a clean install of Vista as I did, the only thing I can think of is: Did you load in 32 or 64 Bit version? ( I don't remember reading it ) I went the 64 Bit way and it seems to load faster. The only other thing that I want to know is, is your HD running in ACHI mode or ATA and are you using intel's matrix Storage Manager or not..........

 

Lol sounds like a lot of work for decent results. I didn't even do a clean install, and I got a boot of under 30 seconds. I even had to reformat my pc back to factory settings about a month ago and I got my boot time back to under 30 seconds a few days later where I had it before I reformatted. 8]

 

=)

I'm going to say that you had to do everything I did above (less the 3 clean-installs, b/c it only takes one! =] )...eh?

But, if you're under 30s, please let us know how you did it, we'd all like a sub-30s boot!

 

Exactly which part of "For the same size drive, you are absolutely correct. " did you not understand?

Yes, that much is obvious to anyone who is comparing these drives.

Gary

 

Then you really need to re-read my message, quoted above.

Gary

 

WARNING...WARNING...castration imminent!

 

What my problem with your statement was that you said I was correct and then differed to compare apples to oranges again!!

 

I said you were right as long as you compared drives of the same size. But I want on to inform folks that a higher capacity 5400 rpm drive might, I repeat MIGHT, out perform a smaller 7200 RPM drive. The point of this being you can't look at the RPM to see what drive is faster (again, unless both drives are the same size). The only real way to compare the speed of ANY two drives is to look at the latency and transfer rates. What is wrong or incorrect with that statement?

I suggest they SHOULD take a second look, in fact they better take a second look if they want the fastest drive they can get. Because they might be looking at a 160 gig 7200 RPM drive thinking it is the fastest they can get only because the RPM is higher. When they might be able to buy a larger 5400 RPM drive and get the same (or possibly better) throughput and more capacity at the same time. The whole point of my reply was not to tell folks that 5400 RPM drives ARE faster but that they CAN be faster.

Your suggestion that they should not take a second look is ridiculous. We are NOT comparing apples to oranges here. We are comparing two different disk drives. Both which perform PRECISELY the same function, just at different throughputs, which is not directly related to the RPM alone.

Gary

 

MY boot time is just less than 3 minutes >_< any help? on vista 64bit ultimate.

 

Well, if the buyer/reader knew how to read then they wouldn't fall under this impression. Give forum members some slack, they know how to read.

 

my boot time is around 1 min and 30 seconds give or take. lol and ive got a bunch of apps loading too. 2gb is really like the minimum for vista or something, i think RAM helps

 

Try Using an SD card for the swap file!

Out of curiosity I disabled hard drive swap file and put a 3.5GB swap file on a 4GB SD memory card in the laptops express card reader.
THIS IS NOT READYBOOST - disable this, actually slowed PC down!

Here are the results each from a clean boot of windows vista.

Task Swap file on hard drive Swap File on SD card

Flight Sim load to menu 36s 14s
Flight Sim load default flight 2 mins 10 secs 1 min 12 secs
Need for speed carbon load 12 secs 6 secs
Windows Load to usable desktop 53 secs 46 secs
Microsoft Outlook load email 19 secs 8 secs

The PC (already pretty quick apart from for flight sim) now feels like a good desktop in loading performance. Wouldn't be suprised if it outperformed it!

Its brilliant! And all it takes is a little SD card sticking out of my card reader which I take out if I wanna upload photo's (enough memory on PC to do that without swap file) and then put back in afterwards.
Or I could use separate reader instead. The PC express reader I purchased reads at 18MB/sec.

 

Is the swap file same as paging file?

How much RAM do you have?

 

guys if you.

1.disable the notifications security alert
2. disable UAC
3. disable windows update

you should shave some serious loading time.

when you hit the welcome screen, 2 seconds and BAM your on your desktop already set and loaded.

couldnt believe how much resources those three took up

 

No. Those 3 shouldn't really help "shave serious boot time."

 

lol i dunno but thats based on my laptop experience. shaved off around 20seconds.

then again ive only got avira, threatfire ati catalyst and camera assistant software running