Replying to How Fast Does Your System Boot, And What's Your Os?

I really do not know why but mine can take up to 5 minutes.

Most of that time spent is a blank screen with a blinking _.

And then hopefully the login screen shows up for XP Home SP2.

Does anyone know any nice little things I can do to speed it up, that shouldn't affect too much?

I don't currently mess with any settings that would affect booting, and I would prefer if I do anything, it not negatively impact on other things.

I'm using gentoo linux and it boots up in less than 30 secs...

Specs:

Intel Pentium D 930
4x512MB 667Mhz Ram
160 GB Samsung Sata Harddrive

I've found Diskeeper 11 to be an especially good help in defragging and boosting everything from boot time to page file access. It does a great job. Course it's not freeware, but worth the investment.

Agreed. Currently using Diskeeper for defragmentation rather than the Windows one. Graphical Interface is pretty comprehensive. With mapping and percentage of how fragment your harddisk. Worth a try if anyone is interested. http://www.diskeeper.com/defrag.asp

I've found Diskeeper 11 to be an especially good help in defragging and boosting everything from boot time to page file access. It does a great job. Course it's not freeware, but worth the investment.

I've booted my OS within 15 secs and I actually counted it.

Anyway for this to happen, my machine didn't have a lot of startup program that need to be loaded at startup. Just a few. And of course I've been doing a few system maintenance quite regularly.

1. Defragmentation. Think it is the core of lagging your system bootup.
2. Removing those startup programs that I don't need it.
3. System cleanup, free space (Some says it doesn't affect the speed of the bootup, but it just gets faster after I done it. )
4. Scanning of virus.

I think that's quite a handfull of tasks to do in a regular basis though I'm not that hardcore to tune my registry.

Cheers.

My 800mhz windows xp desktop boots up in about 3 minutes lol. My 1.8ghz windows xp takes less than 10 seconds to bootup, and my old 366mhz clamshell with OS X takes about 1 minute to boot up. Lol my mac still boots up faster than my windows machine

I think they meant the time it takes to boot until the desktop is shown.

It wasn't really clear.

xboxrulz

does booting mean from time you turn computer on till its logged on, or from logging on till when the computers actually loaded?
mine doesnt take too long, ive never looked to see how long so i cant tell you, though roughly 30 seconds or so.

i havent defragmented my computer for more than a year.
i started it once in the morning and then that night it was only done 30% so i stopped it.

I have vista and it usually boots within about 60 seconds or so (although it is kinda hard to tell because I have to enter a password in to boot up), also I have McAfee antivirus which takes a little bit...and some software for accessing the network (allowing for mapping of network drives from anywhere i have internet access and such) and that slows down the boot a fair amount.

I wish the poll was multiple choice. As it is I could only vote for one of my systems.
So...
Desktop1: (P4, 512MB, 80GB HDD, XP Pro, @ 6 programs launched on startup) - 25 seconds with auto logon

Desktop2: (P DualCore, 2GB, 300+500+160+160+200 HDD, XP Pro, @ 8 programs launched on startup) - 70 seconds

Dual Boot Laptop: (P DualCore, 2GB, 120GB HDD, 2 programs launched on startup) - not counting OS select menu
XP Pro: 25 seconds
Vista: 50 seconds (but when rebooting after installing updates, logon takes 2 or 3 minutes)