Broad brush strokes on WXP tuning

[Steve]

Hi All

I have finally got the time and the inclination to try to get to the bottom
of an enormously long boot up time for WXP.

This problem started to happen a few months ago but I am not sure which
event triggered it. Around about the same time I converted from FAT to NTFS,
installed a problematic version of ZoneAlarm, and I have always had Norton
(the latter two seem to have particular problems). Something else may be
involved but I don't know what.

My questions are very broad (although if sopmeone has a silver bullet then I
would love to know about it too .



1) When people talk of the boot time for WXP (eg 45 seconds) what are they
talking about? I can think of at least 3 phases between powering on to the
desktop becominging fully responsive.

1. Power on to "timer countdown to select system to be booted" (I don't
think this would be included would it?). In my case this is about 15
seconds.

2. Hitting enter to the logon screen where you enter the password. In my
case 65 to 110 seconds (depending upon the things that I have experimented
with - see below)

3. Entering password to a fully responsive desktop. In my case 50 to 120
seconds (depending upon the things that I have experimented with - see
below).



2) I have noticed that if I logoff and logon again, the time to a fully
responsive desktop is much quicker than the first logon. Does anyone know
what accounts for the difference?



Things I have experimented with so far:

Paging file placement and size, regularly do de frags anyway, stopping
all/most programs at startup (including Norton and ZoneAlarm), removing all
desktop icons, deleting Prefetch folder contents, disconnecting all USB
devices, printer and router from the machine.

Any ideas?

Thanks

Steve

 

[Guest]

Get quick tips about setting up and maintaing your computer running Windows XP.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/learnmore/tips/default.mspx

Norton System Works & Anti Virus can slow down a computer by more than 70
seconds as it starts up: check you settings and make sure that it is not set
to perform a scan on startup.

A good way to minimise XP's '0-100' elapsed time is to use the hibernation
feature. This 'shuts down' power to the computer as it does when you press
'Turn Off' button, but will write a file with the current system state. When
the PC starts up XP reads this file and you are usually up and running in
20-30 seconds.

It avoids all the initialisation steps, checking for new hardware and
'loading' of applications and services.

Give it a try if you tune everything to its optimum and still hate the slow
startup.