Boot up

Jimmy Gibson · From: Cornwall, England

Is there any way i can speed my boot up when i turn my PC?? on,it takes ages to load,i have tried holding the shift key down but it don`t make any difference,any help please.Thanks.

Jimmy G

D10 CARTER

Charlie McDonald · From: out of the blue

Mine too, Jimmy. They tell me I need more memory, but I haven't done it yet to find out.
Anybody?

Jack Stoner · From: Kansas City, MO

Startup (boot) on a PC has many factors.
1. Your PC's speed (CPU and I/O BUS). 2. Your Operating System. 3. Memory, although to a lesser extent. 4. What you load at startup. 5, Periodically running defrag on the hard drive will help to speed up Windows startup and also disk I/O in general.

Finally, on some PC's (and I know later Dell's with Windows XP) if you have a USB attached device such as a printer or scanner and it's powered on at boot up and you have the BIOS option for USB boot, it must go through a "time out" cycle (a delay while it tries to contact the USB device and wait for boot response) before it can continue the boot cycle.

Without knowing what OS you have, Memory, etc there is no way of giving specific suggestions, just the general ones.

Gary Shepherd · From: Fox, Oklahoma, USA

Save any files you're working on first.

Click on the start button
Click on run...
Type "msconfig" without the quotes
Click OK
Click the Startup tab
Uncheck everything
Click OK
Click Restart

------------------
Gary Shepherd

Carter D-10

www.16tracks.com

Dave Potter · From: Texas

quote:
Click on the start button
Click on run...
Type "msconfig" without the quotes
Click OK
Click the Startup tab
Uncheck everything
Click OK
Click Restart

Might want to be a little bit cautious about doing that.

If I did it, I would disable:

1) My firewall
2) My email filter
3) The utility that enables USB communication with my Windows based cellphone (Activesync)
4) The utility that provides real-time monitoring of several system temperature sensors on my motherboard
5) My anti-virus program
6) My video card support utilities
7) The Microsoft anti-spyware monitoring utility

I don't think loss of any of those would be a good trade-off for a few seconds of boot time.

[This message was edited by Dave Potter on 11 August 2005 at 09:56 AM.]

Will Holtz · From: San Francisco, California, USA

If you are using WinXP, you may save time by having your computer go into "Stand By" or "Hibernate" instead of shutting it down.

Granted this won't work if you actually need to reboot inorder to complete some software/hardware install or to fix a computer from a messed up state.

Jack Stoner · From: Kansas City, MO

Standby and Hibernate are not recommended for desktop PC's. It has been well documented that Standby can cause many flakey problems, such as no audio after coming out of standby, or no peripheral I/O or no keyboard control, or modem will not respond, or OS issues, etc, etc. Standby was originally designed for laptops to conserve battery power.

Hibernate doesn't buy you anything except a longer time to shutdown and a longer startup time.

The consensus on several hardware fourms is to only "power off" the monitor and hard drive(s) at whatever time delay inverval you select. Nothing else.

richard burton · From: Britain

Is the BIOS set to do a full scan on startup?
If so, this will cause a very long startup period.

Charlie McDonald · From: out of the blue

I just go get a cup of coffee while the puter boots. We've got lots of programs to load up.

But these are great ideas. Unplugging that scanner is one, and disabling hibernate.

Dave Potter · From: Texas

Michael Barone · From: Downingtown, Pennsylvania

Assuming everything above has been addressed, I would mention one more thing. You could try one of the shareware programs that scan and clean out the registry. There is always stuff in there you don't need that is residual from a variety of operations, configuration changes, program uninstalls, etc. Sometimes the registry tells the machine to look for something, and if it can't find what its looking for, it can hang or take a long boot time.

It wouldn't hurt to run Microsoft's anti-spyware program, as Wiz suggested in another topic.

Just my thoughts.

------------------
Mike Barone
Sho-Bud Pro-1 5&4 with RHL | Nashville 112
Assorted Guitars & Keyboards

Jack Stoner · From: Kansas City, MO

I have to disagree with the Registry "cleaners". I've found that they can do more harm than good.

Dave Potter · From: Texas

Both Registry Fix and Registry Mechanic have performed flawlessly for me for about a year now on my WinXP Home.

I use them both, because they often find different things to correct, and they do it with no adverse effect, at least so far.

It's mind-boggling how much junk is left in the registry from application uninstalls frequently, even when the coding is from major software houses. I don't like that stuff accumulating in there. It serves no useful purpose, and over time, it bloats the registry needlessly.

[This message was edited by Dave Potter on 14 August 2005 at 04:05 PM.]

Jack Stoner · From: Kansas City, MO

Dave, when you go on sevice calls and find out a registry cleaner or some "repair" program has caused the problems, you will think differently.

In a way I like them as it generates service calls for me ($$)

Dave Potter · From: Texas

quote:
when you go on sevice calls and find out a registry cleaner or some "repair" program has caused the problems, you will think differently.

In a way I like them as it generates service calls for me

Actually, Jack, years of my own experience with these kinds of things lead me to agree with you in part. There are some "registry cleaners" out there that don't work well. Some do.

If I had just discovered the two I mentioned in my post earlier, and if I had no experience dealing with registry issues, I surely would not have added bandwidth to this thread with my recommendation. But, since neither happens to be the case, I felt it might possibly be of some value to someone (obviously not you) who had an interest in registry hygiene.

As I said, I've been using the two I referenced on a regular basis for a year or so, so I can attest that they won't break the registry or cause other adverse effects. Both find specious registry items, which I recognize as such from my many hours of manual registry editing experience. An example would be references to software I've uninstalled successfully. Easy call if the registry still contains a lot of stuff about that software after uninstall, and it happens often. Both also include many other useful features, such as registry backups, excludes, and others.

Enjoy the service calls you're getting, but please do let me know if you ever get one you can confirm is the result of either of these two programs.

[This message was edited by Dave Potter on 15 August 2005 at 12:14 PM.]

Michael Barone · From: Downingtown, Pennsylvania

I like to learn something new everyday, and place value in the advice of everyone on the forum.

I should have been more specific in my original post, regarding the registry. I can only substantiate my suggestion from customer work performed during the last school year.

Last year we had about 22 customers with very slow computers, boot up and operation problems. Most of these had spyware, but we believe (my students and I) that Registry Mechanic and Registry Fix improved 2 computers out of maybe 20 where nothing else worked after running Spy-Bot, Adaware, and such. It’s a small percentage, but these registry editing programs caused no detectable problems in our cases.

We have seen one computer problem where a registry editing program previously run was suspected as being the problem, according to the customer. In that case we tried to recover a backup of the registry or repair it. I think we ended up backing up important files, reformatting, reinstalling the OS & programs because all else didn't work. We believe in this case, that the customer mismanaged the use of the program suspected as being the problem.

Some (of these 22) customers returned 3 days later to say that the problem reoccurred (very slow computer). Upon finding this out, the students involved with the repair have eye contact with me, and without saying a word, we knew that the customer did not heed our advice, and got spyware again. They continued their unchanged browsing habits, allowing Active X and other junk to take control.

Hope I’m not off-topic too much here, just wanted to share my experiences.

------------------
Mike Barone
Sho-Bud Pro-1 5&4 with RHL | Nashville 112
Assorted Guitars & Keyboards

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