How Long Is Your PC Boot Time ?

QUOTE(sPyfReEsTyLe @ Aug 28 2005, 11:03 PM) How long does ur pc normally take to boot up? I've got a 3GHz CPU, 512mb RAM, ATI RADEON 9600 graphics, 200gb hard drive yet my PC takes like 2 minutes to fully boot up and be usable. (excluding typing password) Is this normal? It seem a bit long? Any thoughts? _________________ my pc 533 mhz cpu, 128 mb ram, trident 4 mb, 20 gb hard drive but, my pc take 70 seconds to fully boot up

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For a desktop/server, uptime/stability is definitely more useful. You can use ACPI etc to send the machine to sleep (there are various states either saving to RAM i.e. S3/standby or to the HDD i.e. S4/hibernate), and that way you're 'up & running' ASAP without incurring an adverse electricity bill! MS's XP goals were 30sec boot, 20secs hibernate, 5secs standby. They are trying to reduce it further in Vista & by using flash-based SSD/HDD combination devices .. but the latter was also meant for mobiles to reduce power consumption of mechanical rotating HDDs.

It's also a bit misleading in the sense that, in my case, with minimal params, the BIOS checks take about 5secs (mostly on the RAM, netboot, etc), XP takes another 10secs to get to the login screen, and then it takes a further 5-10secs to actual get to a usable desktop with around 30 processes running in the background! Basically, things are still loading when XP shows users the login screen! Not that important though.

For mobiles, though, it is important. MS focused on fast booting for Win XP, so I've never seen a machine take longer than 40secs once this came out (obviously I've not tried installing it on a 286 or something!).

1. disable things that you don't need in the BIOS (e.g. some disk controllers take an age to check through each ID).

2. You should minimise the services that start on bootup .. some of the ones I've seen on friends machines were only used rarely so I changed these to manual startup (though often you'd need admin rights to restart those AFAIK).

3. defrag, use bootviz (I agree with the earlier poster .. it's very very useful to help you focus on the slowest problem areas .. e.g. drivers that take a long time to load, dumb services that retry several times to find something on the network that's no longer there, etc). A person on another forum notices a Nero service added about 15secs to their boot time!!

4. upgrade the RAM, and/or HDD. The former is obvious, it reduces the need to access the HDD all the time. For the latter, there are two issues here: access times (the latency time for the head to get around to the correct position to get the data) and bandwidth (the amount of data per sec the interface can transfer). To reduce the former you need faster rotation speeds or more RAM/cache/etc. To increase the latter you need more modern interfaces, and a RAID array to max out that interface. SATA/NCQ & SCSI drives have intelligent queues to handle multiple requests, so that's another option. Another thing that's sometimes discusses are the various SSDs that are available at horrendous costs! They're not that useful, as Anand found out .. the BIOS ends up being the main factor in the boot time. Now, you could install a thin BIOS (if your board was supported by it), but then you'd be limited in which OS's you could run (2k not XP) .. still you could move to an embedded Linux and have a much faster boot up .. but I presume you want Windows XP & to be able to run normal apps like games, so this option is probably out!!

http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2480 is the Anand's review of the Gigabyte SSD. Notice the single SATA Raptor booted Windows in 14s, and the (admittedly limited) 4GB SSD did it in 9s. It takes power from the PCI, data is over a SATA connector.

Personally I don't see the point. Ideally, I'd much rather just avoid booting up altogether (by making sure I keep my main OS stable, secure etc), and then use that RAM in their native sockets (unless I had some old RAM that wouldn't go in the board & wouldn't sell for much!) as a RAM drive to use them at full speed (rather than SATA speeds) for caching apps or large files so they'd load quicker & would be faster to work with. Linux has some really good RAM caching algorithms built in ... I'm not sure about Windows but there are tons of soft-ramdrive vendors' ads that's I've seen.

 

 

 

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My Fastest full boot was 6 seconds on a 1.2Ghz Athlon. Running Linux From Scratch.
now thats impressive !!!!

Ofcourse it was just running the standard boot services, nothing fancy like Xorg, LOL.

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Yeah, It seems that over time your computer will start to slow down no matter what you try and do. A new install is probably the way to go if you are at your hairs end. The only problem with that is the amount of time it will take to reinstall everything you like to have on your computer. From what I understand, it's good to do a fresh install about once every year to year and a half anyway. A lot of these guys have good ideas as to how to speed up your boot time and clean up your registry/system files. It's up to you as to what you wanna do.

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Well my windows which I reinstalled on August end, takes to boot less than one minute, I have it clean, but yeah what I don't like about windows is that it gets slower with time, even if you don't install anything new on it, but my boot time did not get slow a lot, I don't have a lot in my startup after the windows shows up, only some anti virus, gaim and xchat, oh and windowblinds.

Gentoo also takes less than one minute, but it shutdowns faster than windows, that what I like about them.

AmigaOS takes 14 seconds to load, but its startup is quite big and if it would run on modern hardware it would boot much much faster, hehe like on Winuae

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30 to 40 seconds without loging in windows xp.
i got p4 2.6Mhz 1024 mb ddr geforce 6600 256mb 80g hd

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AMD Duron 800 MHz 384 RAM Windows XP Professional (5 years old). Boot time: 50 sec. The only programs that startup are: Kaspersky Antivirus Personal, MicrosoftAntispyware and Creative AudioHQ. The rest of it i can start it manualy.

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Ok now, all of a sudden it's taking about 1 minute for my computer to laod the beginning screen. It stays at it for like 1 minute and I thought it froze or something but it didn't, it's just.. loading? then it goes to the normal boot screens of the Windows XP and then the login, and then the main desktop.

I know it never did that before until now. It used to take a total of about 1 minute from loading screen, to desktop, now it's taking almost 2 minutes. 2 minutes doesn't really kill me, but seriously though, it shouldn't be doing that for some reason.

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