Measuring boot start up time?

How do you guys measure it? I see people say they get 20 second boot times, but that seems fast.

I have a 250GB 7200 RPM HDD, and measuring from the moment I hit the power button, starting from a shut down, not hibernate, no password account, and hitting the desktop, I get around 40 seconds. I disabled some program start up processes.

"Starting Windows" is about 7 seconds after powering on, aka after the BIOS.

So, how are people with similar specs having 20 second boot ups?

 

20 seconds isn't all that fast. With readyboost and eboostr3, I can get the boot time (from pressing the power button to everything finished loading) to about 15 seconds.

I have a video from youtube to show you how fast/slow my boot time is.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m84V-jAKRXM

 

That was about 24 seconds in your video

Anyway, how?

 

Um.. basically, unplug all your accessories, external monitor..etc. Disable unnecessary hardware through device manager. Disable unused features in bios for faster POST time.

Caching through readyboost/eboostr3 or a combination of both.

 

Jack, wondering what hardware you disabled. Here's mine.

 

I disabled my webcam, lan, one of my cardreader, unused usb ports. Basically, I don't have that much hardware to begin with. My netbook's hardware is very simple.

 

Enabling No GUI boot from msconfig seems to have shaved 1 or 2 seconds...lol ;x

 

Well.. now we're talking about chaning the bootup process and there are a gazillion ways to do it.

By changing the boot process, I can make XP boot in less than 5 seconds. 1 second for the boot screen and 1 second to load desktop, and 3 seconds to load all the startup programs. But that'll reduce its asthetic and usability.

 

How? I've pretty much messed with everything there is to shave seconds off boot time.

 

UM...use nlite, remove all unused driver, features, services, visual elements.
That'll shave the idle ram ussage to around 50-80MB. In extreme cases, 30MB idle ram ussage is possible.

In Windows, remove all unnecessary hardare from device manger. Delay start the network connection. Disable GUI boot.

Defrag, Optimize, Defrag, Optimize your boot files so everything will load faster.

After doing that, you'll probably get boot time less than 5 seconds on Windows XP.

 

Ok, well that is a little extreme, I would like to actually USE my notebook lol.
But basically I've done all those just not to the extremes besides delaying network and still 30 seconds. Boot time actually increased these past few months, no clue why. That video I recorded my boot under 30, wish I had that back. ;[

BTW My win7 uses only 18% ram when it boots up compared to 26% on Vista and I have tweaked Vista a lot more. So def. improvement as far as superfetch goes for win7.

 

the reason why my netbook boots up so fast is partly due to its simpler hardare.

 

I know. Netbooks lack as much hardware as regular notebooks.

Anyways. I wonder if NTREGOPT works on W7? Do you use it?

 

I boot in 17 seconds, from pressing the power button to everything loaded including firefox.

But I cheated.. I use hibernate and XP. Cold boot would be 47 seconds. That's why I use hibernation all the time.

 

LOL.. cheater...

Start from hibernation takes 5 seconds from pressing powerbutton to finished loading everything.

Start from sleep taks 2 seconds.

Start from nothing, (leaving your computer turned on 24/7) takes 0 seconds and that's what I do.

 

I don't use NTREGOPT. I "optimize" my registry with CC cleaner portable in rare occasions and defrag them.

 

On what laptop?

Mine is NC10 with WD1600BEKT. I have not applied any tweaks though.

 

I know there is a registry entry for shut down time that i twaked for vista, cut my shutdown time in half all on its own its a "wait" basically to make sure the system has everything closed before it powers down. I wonder if boot up has a similar setting??

As far as boot speed, the best tweak I ever did was use tweakxp to scan my boot sequence, it makes you reboot your comptuer then reads every file your computer uses when it boots, it will then defrag those files and place them in sequencial order back to back on the hdd, when I did this on my C90S it cut boot time in half easy.

 

My desktop is on 24/7. So yea, love that boot up time. ;]
However, my laptop is always on the go for school. So I care for fast boot up times. I don't like hibernate for some reason. I rather have my laptop safely turned off completely, yes I know hibernate turns it off, but just having my disk activity, etc saved bothers me. lol.

What do you use to defrag the registry? NTREGOPT is pretty much the best there is at compacting it. Just not sure if it will work with w7.

 

I know that tweak as well, but Windows 7 pretty much makes that tweak obsolete.

If you still want instant shutdown without the "waiting" period, use this command.

shutdown -s -f -t 00

This works on Windows xp, vista, 7 and it'll showdown your computer immediately.

 

Mine is acer aspire one with WD1600BEVT with PCI-E Card reader + Fast SDcard + readyboost+ eboostr3.

Also, I have 1GB of ram thus wake from hibernation take less time.

 

Diskeeper works pretty well. Also, I sort of cache my registries on "poor man's SSD" thus accessing frequently used registry is usually "instant".

 

I've got it don now to 7 seconds bios, 7 seconds for windows. Oh well fast enough for me.

 

There's no Bios screen in hibernation mode for me.
So 0 bios + 5 seconds for windows.

From cold boot, Bios takes 1 or 2 seconds.

 

Didn't we discuss this already?

Jackluo is like the "cost no object" expert on bootup time. I am not ready to go that extreme. I've disabled iTune and Quicktime in msconfig. The nVidia driver and media library...I am contemplating to disable the media library...but still just contemplating.

 

The extreme short boot time is only for experimentation purpose only. My normal setup takes 20 seconds to boot.

 

20 seconds is extreme for some of us.