Tips/Tricks/Reccommendations to Decrease Start-up Time?

microsoft is planning to remove shutdown as a main feature, and place it to a more special-need feature. the main feature an ordinary person needs are standby, and restart. restart they need normally only once a month, the second thuesday.

they put away the focus from shutdown in vista, but due to complains people put it back in. they search for new namings and other solutions to get people to stop shutdown and boot up everytime.

 

Like I said, I'm happy to free up cache space on my NAND to go towards more important system files. If it can cut my boot time in half I'm sure it will put other files to good use as well.

 

if you remove boot time ammounts, it'll use it for other things, too. as it puts the most used stuff in there. if you only boot once a month, the boot files will not be in cache at all. your favourite apps and files will be there, then.

 

My point exactly. It should soon begin caching more important files like frequently used OS files.

 

you win on all sides.

no time spent on booting
no time spent on starting the apps you want to continue work on
no time spent loading the files in the apps you want to continue work on

AND faster caching of the stuff you care, thanks to freeing the momentus XT from the boot caching.

 

Hey, Hungry Man and Gracy123 have just turned the thread to other direction?
An interesting one, btw.

Actually, I do go for complete shutdowns and cold boot. But that's mainly because I dual boot Windows and Ubuntu.

I used to hibernate, but that resulted on several problems (corrupted files,...) as I frequently needed to boot to the other OS.

Sleep mode I've never really used as a habit, since I never knew for sure how long it would be sustained by the battery. How many hours can you safely get on Sleep Mode while unplugged from the wall?


Since it has been a pain to use Linux on my new Sandy Bridge and Optimus laptop, I'm considering using it on a Virtual Machine. I'll have to try it to see if I wouldn't miss anything.

 

my work laptop can sleep over the whole weekend and still has 70-80% batterylife.

but for os switchers, yes, it might be an issue.

"i never knew for sure how long" how about testing? and the system does just shut down if power is low (hibernate normally), so no data loss even if there's not enough power for sleepmode.

 

Thanks for the feedback... it seems like it could take some days.

I haven't tested because never really felt the need to... I don't feel much comfortable carrying it around on my backpack while it is still energised and producing heat. Maybe its not that big deal...

But I think I'll start using sleep mode more often...
I actually don't bother much on startup times but mostly with shutdown time on Windows

 

Hi all.

It looks like I spawned quite a discussion. I actually shut-down/restart every day. But I'm not doing this to scientifically come out with saved time after 2 years lol. It's just something that came into my head that I decided I wanted to try to do.

So far, I downloaded Gary's attachment, ran it (there was not option to "run as administrator"), but the cmnd window literally closed right after it opened . I should also note that I did run "boot defrag" on Defraggler the other day. Perhaps that has something to do with this.

I'm going to try the other method. I won't be duplicating my hard-drive, but since Gary's method did not seem to increase the speed (perhaps I did something wrong), we'll see how this goes.

Also, I'm wondering if I shouldn't re-install FF since it takes like 30 launch after the desktop comes up.

 

OK, I just tried to use the other method here, but I got lost as soon as I cliked the first link.

It took me here. I have no idea which download to install or even how to find out.

Thanks for any help.

 

Why don't you just try PerfectDisk!? It is very good for normal defragmentation too and offers boot-defragmentation! Give it a try!

 

Thanks for the tip. I'll see how it goes. I did use defraggler, but I'll give this a try as well.

 

No you don't have to do this "on a regular basis", you only have to redo the boot defrag when something changes in your boot files. Otherwise they stay in the same place. Things like driver updates or updates to apps/services that run at boot time are the only thing that affects this. The batch file I provided in the other thread can be run while you sleep, so there is no 15 minutes involved. More like 15 seconds and if you set it up as a scheduled task it is 0 seconds. And while I use sleep and hibernate all the time, there are occasions where I NEED to reboot. And when defraging the files dropped the reboot time from 3 minutes to 90 seconds, frankly those 15 seconds to start the defrag were more than worth it the first time I did have to reboot.

Gary

True, but as a side note this is less of an issue in Win7 than it was in Vista or XP. Win7 no longer writes the entire contents of memory to the hard drive when hibernating. It now uses a more intelligent algorithm to skip parts that are unnecessary.

Gary

No, basically the ONLY thing running are the memory chips. Very minimal heat and no moving parts whatsoever.

Gary

Heat is much less of an enemy that heating and cooling cycles. The stress introduced by expansion and contraction is much worse than a steady temp state. Besides that there is almost no heat generated by the memory chips when in a sleep state. You'd need a VERY accurate thermometer to measure their difference from ambient temps, while the machine is asleep. But really this is moot, since you have an SSD. For us mere mortals with spinning drives sleep is a godsend.

Gary

That's a big assumption that defragging the bootfiles only saves 10 seconds. For me the first time I did it made a MUCH larger difference than that and many other folks who responded to the other thread reported similar results. Subsequent runs after driver, startup app/service updates etc. were more in that range of 10 seconds.

Gary

 

Well I happen to update a driver or else at least once a month

Don't know to what extend this is true - my boot times increase with time and decrease radically after boot-defragging. So I'm not ready to agree that "everything stays where it is " ...

Actually I would say this is a quite accurate assumption for an average effect on an up-to-date system, which boots for about a minute with a mechanical HDD by default. But if you are going to be more happy with this - let it be 1 minute.

And? A minute a week or even a month? 1 minute difference !? hmmmmm
As stated above - shutting down is more or less in the past.

P.s. You can multi-quote...

 

You did do something wrong... big ol' grin. If you right click on the batch file you will see a "Run as Administrator" option. There are no options in the batch file itself.

Gary

 

shouldn't produce heat really at all. it's standy, not full-usage.

and there are ways to reduce the shutdown time on windows, btw. but i can't stand dualboot setups. if i would have the chance, i would go to some vm-setup, and stay in one os (use standby there), and have the other in a vm running in the background. there are interesting integration solutions available there.

for the shutdown optimisation, there's this (not tested on win7 myself, but used on xp). it forces the processes to get closed faster if they don't close themselves. if your shutdown time is very long, then most likely some service fails to close correctly. then, this helps (the brutal way, but as it's most likely brutally killed anyways as it isn't closing on it's own.. no difference)

 

Oh, so you DO defrag the boot files then. Why do you continue to argue against the practice???

Didn't I just say that? After a system is optimized (boot defragged) the first time, it does fall into the averages you are clinging to. The new updated drivers, apps etc are the only things be reordered in the subsequent boot defrags, so of course the net change is quite small. I only made mention of the one minute improvement on the FIRST boot defrag that someone does.

Wow really, gee I never knew that. I've only been on this forum for five years.

Gary

 

she only argues that the boot files don't stay defragged for long after you defragged them. where you stated they stay where they are except if you do massive system changes (service pack, boot time driver updates).

i think the truth is somewhere inbetween.

 

Thanks for the tip!
I'll take a closer look when on Windows
I agree that dual boot is quite a pain. I've tried using VM before, but it was a much more limited experience. It was some years ago, I believe things could be turned better now.


The boot time doesn't bother me much because I'm used to turn the pc on and make some other short useful things, like get a coffee, arrange the desk or go to the bathroom.

But sometimes we simply have to shut off the laptop on a hurry and Windows will annoy you then. It is one of my favorite things in Linux over Windows (actually I like them both, not wanting to start a war here, each has its own pros and cons), that it shuts off in 3 seconds. Windows can take minutes if processes don't want to quit or if it thinks it must install urgent updates. In such situation I think sleeping is quite a solution that I'm missing.

 

this is why i never shut down when i'm in a hurry. standby there is definitely way to go. close the lid, done. you do that anyways when you move.
sleep + virtualisation should be the best thing. and yes, it should have improved quite a bit by now.

if you think virtualisation is slow, you might be in need of a better harddrive or an ssd even. it all depends, of course.

but i hope you can at least reduce the shutdown time as a first thing.

 

I mentioned it at least 4-5 times already, that I DO boot-defragment!

What I argue about is how useful this is nowadays. Or shortly said - yes, I do boot-defrag, but sometimes I wonder why I do that, considering that I only benefit from it once every 10 days winning 10-20 seconds.

That's all. Nowadays boot-time is almost irrelevant.

I found the example with the mobile phone very suitable - Do you care about how long it takes for your phone to cold-start? Well not really as you probably only switch it off like once every few months or when the battery goes to 0.

But I agree that the thread is specifically about that (useful or not) so different methods should be discussed.

 

Agh, I have an android phone and I care. It takes quite a while.

 

On my first gen Core 2 Duo HP nx9420 I checked how much power it used when turned off, and when using standby. This was three years ago.
I used a kill-a-watt type of power meter, and the battery was removed.

When turned off, the power usage jumped between 1.5 - 2 W.
When using standby, the power usage jumped between 1.5 - 2 W.

I can imagine that newer laptops uses less power in both situations.

 

Gary, when I open the Zipped folder that you provide as a download, it shows the "DefragBootFiles" batch file. When I right-click on this, it give me the following options: OPEN, CUT, COPY, DELETE, PROPERTIES.

What am I doing wrong?

Thanks for the help.

 

What you are doing wrong is not reading the directions. Look at the post again:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/mic...r-vista-tips-tweaks-guide-79.html#post2737834

It says to open the zip file and move the batch file to your desk top. Go back and reread the directions in the post to make sure you do ALL the proper steps.

Gary

 

i have windows phone 7, startup time 10 seconds.

still, i don't care. haven't restarted the phone ever.

 

Depends on the phone. If you made the mistake of getting yourself an iPhone (as I did... ), you're going to have to reboot the darn thing quite frequently, for all sorts of reasons... I learned my lesson, though: Next time when I need a phone, I'll get a phone, rather than an Apple toy.

 

i've an iphone here at work and never need to reboot it. but yes, i prefer my winphone7 by far. both are stable, though.

 

:yes:

 

I'm just getting a dumb phone next contract probably. If I'm going to be spending money on a data plan I'll spend it on one for my cr48.

 

THANKS!! I see now. I was moving the ZIP FILE to the decktop, not the batch file. Let me try and see how it goes.

 

Gary, it worked! It sat there for about 10 min or so on the first line, but then the second line (the defrag one) appeared and it ran for about 15-20 min all together.

I ran it twice and my boot time stands around 54 sec from power button push to desktop.

So far, I've disabled almost all the startup programs shown in "soluto," set the boot order so the harddrive is loaded first, and set it to use 2 cores (max) when booting.

Given that I'm on a laptop with 5400 RPM harddrive, do you think I'm doing pretty good so far?

Any other recommendations?

I see Perfect Disk is a paid-for software, but I will give the trial version a go.

 

Running the batch file a second time is of no additional value, if there have been no system changes.

Setting the OS to "use 2 cores" does NOTHING. The default is to use all available cores. That setting is there to force the machine to use LESS cores.

Gary

 

Normally yes...

But give the trial version a try, nothing to loose.

 

I used perfect disk on my old hard drive but I didn't notice any significant performance boost. If you're going to pay for software I'd try eboostr + more RAM.

 

perfectdisk is the best I've ever used. Try using the "Aggressive" performance deformation method and also boot defrag.

Both show quite noticeable effect...

 

I won't be defragging again until I'm way more fragmented, which I don't see becoming an issue for a while as I only use about 50GB of my drive at the moment out of 500. Defragging = messing the cache up for me and the cache provides way more speed anyway.

 

I tweaked it a few more times. I set the "time to display list of operating systems" to 5 sec. (not sure if this means anything since I'm not running dual operating sytems) and then I set it to boot using "max memory" under the boot tab in MSconfig and I set the "Timeout" to 5 sec.

I'm up to my best time so far : 50 sec from power button push for desktop to appear and about another 15 to 20 sec. for Firefox to launch. If I remove the bootskin, this brings desktop time to 47 and FF launch to under a minuet all together.


Gary, I think your file must work really well because I downloaded the Perfect Disk free trial software and selected to defrag specific files.

Well, I selected "Boot" from the file tree, and ever file in every subfolder was listed as "not fragmented"! Also, my overall harddrive was listed as excellent with "performance at 98.4% since I had run Defraggler several days ago. Guess that's a pretty good software as well.

 

I have been using Soluto to watch my boot up time and to manage what needs to be running and what doesnt.

 

I'm going to wait for Soluto to come out of beta before using it again.

 

Just curious, why is that?

Gary

 

It doesn't have the whole "genome" thing done and I feel that that could be a more important feature.

Otherwise, it doesn't really do anything for me. I ran it once, there was one "definitely disable" startup entry (chrome's) and other than that everything was fine.

 

Also, some folks have trouble installing/uninstalling it and some have had it cause problems on their computer as well.

OK, I just tried a program called Autoruns, but I'm kind of confused by it.

There are a dozen tabs, but I'm not sure if everything under the "EVERTHING" tab is really affecting my start-up. When I look At my "LOGON" tab, it more accurately resembles what my startup msconfig looks like.

Here are some of the things listed in the "everthing tab." Note that there is A LOT more than this.







Here is what the logon tab shows:



For my purposes, should I only be concerned with the logon tab?

Thanks for the help.

 

Autoruns is too dangerous IMO and it won't give a huge benefit to disable most things that aren't listed normally.

Use Soluto if you want to see how each startup is effecting performance.

 

I think you're right.

If you read some of my previous posts, I am using Soluto. It was interesting seeing how the various processes affected my boot time.

I downloaded Revo uninstaller and when I click on the "autorun manager", it shows the same programs the are shown in the "log on" tab of the Autorun program I just mentioned. Perhaps I was right in thinking that all of the items shown in the "Everything" tab of Autoruns aren't too much to be concerned about

I wonder if a lot of these aren't the items listed in the "services" tab of MSCONFIG. I know I haven't disabled any of those.

I'll probably just uninstall autoruns since it doesn't seem to be that valuable to me.

 

Autoruns has a lot of things in there that will break your computer if you disable them... like vital drivers for your computer. MSconfig is safer and will give you teh same performance.

 

I didn't know that. Thanks for the head's up.

 

It has maybe been posted before, but make sure both cores are activated during boot-up!

 

Why? The default is to have ALL cores activated during boot-up. The option you refer to is only there to allow you to REDUCE the number of cores active.

Gary

 

Yep. I always make sure, in my case it is set to 2. And set the timeout for proceses to 3 sek.