Speed Up Boot and Shutdown Times
Shorten the time it takes for your desktop to appear when you turn on your
PC, and make XP shut down faster as well.
No matter how fast your PC boots, it's not fast enough. Here are several
hacks to get you right to your desktop as quickly as possible after startup.
Perform a Boot Defragment
There's a simple way to speed up XP startup: make your system do a boot
defragment, which will put all the boot files next to one another on your
hard disk. When boot files are in close proximity to one another, your system
will start faster.
On most systems, boot defragment should be enabled by default, but it
might not be on yours, or it might have been changed inadvertently. To
make sure that boot defragment is enabled on your system, run the Registry
Editor and go to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Dfrg\BootOptimizeFunction
Edit the Enable string value to Y if it is not already set to Y. Exit the Registry
and reboot. The next time you reboot, you'll do a boot defragment.
I've found many web sites recommending a way of speeding
up boot times that might in fact slow down the amount of
time it takes to boot up and will probably slow down
launching applications as well. The tip recommends going to
your C:\WINDOWS\Prefetch directory and emptying it every
week. Windows uses this directory to speed up launching
applications. It analyzes the files you use during startup and
the applications you launch, and it creates an index to where
those files and applications are located on your hard disk. By
using this index, XP can launch files and applications faster.
So, by emptying the directory, you are most likely slowing
down launching applications. In my tests, I've also found
that after emptying the directory, it takes my PC a few seconds
longer to get to my desktop after bootup.
Hack Your BIOS for Faster Startups
When you turn on your PC, it goes through a set of startup procedures in its
BIOS before it gets to starting XP. So, if you speed up those initial startup
procedures, you'll make your system start faster.
You can speed up your startup procedures by changing the BIOS with the
built-in setup utility. How you run this utility varies from PC to PC, but you
| Startup and Shutdown
typically get to it by pressing the Delete, F1, or F10 keys during startup.
You'll come to a menu with a variety of choices. Here are the choices to
make for faster system startups:
Quick Power On Self Test (POST)
When you choose this option, your system runs an abbreviated POST
rather than the normal, lengthy one.
Boot Up Floppy Seek
Disable this option. When it's enabled, your system spends a few extra
seconds looking for your floppy drive—a relatively pointless procedure,
especially considering how infrequently you use your floppy drive.
Boot Delay
Some systems let you delay booting after you turn on your PC so that
your hard drive gets a chance to start spinning before bootup. Most
likely, you don't need to have this boot delay.
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