Long boot-time? Watch this

Disabling startup programs in msconfig isn't the best way to go about improving your startup time as that article suggests. Just recommending users to randomly untick things could have adverse effects on applications that aren't expecting to be yanked from startup, and while that might be fine for some, it would be far better to find the option in said program, if it exists, for disabling it on startup (most legitimate programs have this.)

I've seen all manner of niggles and annoyances that have come from users following such "guides", then wondering why their printer tray has stopped working or their trackpad is suddenly behaving differently...

Besides, if there's a *really* big delay in startup time, chances are Dropbox, live messenger and whatever else loading on startup isn't the issue. Much more likely to be a virus hanging around, a corrupted filesystem, or perhaps even a hardware issue.
 
But not every one knows what their doing.
There are a lot of factors in trouble shooting long boot times. CPU speed and associated ram (how much and how fast). What operating system. How many devices you have installed like dual vid cards and pci sound cards. The more goodies you have will contribute to boot time as the drivers for those devices have to be loaded in.
Programs like yahoo and msn chat will by default load at boot up. When installing those types of programs set them not to load at boot up. Or go in the settings and uncheck load at boot up. Those sort of programs need to load only when called for by the user.
MSConfig is not for rookies. It's not a one stop cure all.
 
There is a difference between knowing what a program does and how to disable the unnecesary programs to cut down on the boot time :)
 
Last edited:
My system that I use on a daily bases - not my server.
XP Pro SP3

Intel Celeron M Single core CPU - 1.73 GHz

2.5 GB of primary storage

133 MHz FSB (This should be taken into account when looking at start up time, since the hard drive data has to go in the processer to get to RAM - since only the CPU can write to RAM and FSB speeds are often the limiting factor in performance.)

19.2 Sec

This is because of my virtual software like Damon Tools and other cool stuff that is just so cool that needs to load with Windows.

HOWEVER - The overall speed when in the GUI is like Speedy Gonzalez on crack.
 
Back
Top Bottom