Well, Jose, after further fruitless searching I have concluded that I
shouldn't worry about being able to "warm boot" wit XP SP3. My cold start
time from a pressing the start button on my computer to a visible desktop is
about 47 seconds and a re-boot takes about 43 seconds so guess I'll leave
well enough alone and be satisfied with those times.
Thanks for your interest
=====================================================
That is most interesting and I read those links and some others I
found.
That feature of skipping the BIOS POST operation seems to have
disappeared after Windows 9X (I think I may remember it) and read
about a few some hacks that were supposed to enable it in XP, but none
worked.
I have a stopwatch for timing things that are not logged someplace so
that after performance adjustments I don't end up saying things like:
I think things might be faster, things seem to be faster, things
definitely seem faster etc. Too subjective for me. I want to measure
it how long it takes my system to boot to at least the tenths of
seconds.
I wondered how much time I would save if this feature worked...
My BIOS has a "Quick Boot" option, does no RAM checks, doesn't look at
the floppy or CD drive as a boot option, etc. I adjusted the settings
a long time ago to speed up my boot time (one of many several things I
learned to do). If I want my RAM checked or to boot on a CD, I will
tell the BIOS to do it when I want - don't do it for me. Just telling
it not to first look at the floppy and CD can save you several
seconds.
I made a new boot.ini with just XP in it (you really don't even need
that) rebooted from power up three times and timed from the power up
beep to the first XP screen and it takes 2.86 seconds average, so I
don't see how this feature of skipping the POST would help me much,
but it might be a nice feature if it worked and I did not have my BIOS
set up to do all the checks. I did not turn everything back on to
default POST settings though and don't remember how long it used to
take, but any delay is annoying to me.
I have switched from a rebooter to mostly a hibernator these days
unless I am making changes where a reboot "might" be required or I
want to really be sure something works as expected when somebody does
reboot, in which case I always reboot just to remove the question of
did I reboot.
There is a MS article and some others that say it only works in 95, 98
and ME (Google shift+restart to read).
Do you really think you have a POST that takes too long - maybe you
can do what I did (skip the stuff you don't need), or is it some other
thing that is your issue?
Somebody else may know some other ways.
