Speed Up Boot and Shutdown Times

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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