Bootup Time

[Guest]

Okay guys, here is the million dollar question: What can i do to increase my system bootup? I have NOTHING in my startup menu, i have no applications that bootup with my system, there is nothing foreign in my autoexec.bat but im still not satisfied with my system bootup time, it seems to stall a few seconds too long at the command prompt right after the windows ME logo. I only have my anti-virus software on startup, nothing else, i am running a PIII 733@825 with 256 SDRam, asus P3V4x and i have 2 hadrives, one cd burner...and i just dont seem to get the same boot up as my neighbour with a PIII800 with 128 ram.......ARRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH

 

[Bubba]

Do you have a network card installed? If so take it out, things will surely speed up.
If this is not an option try going to the Run box and type msconfig. There will be a startup tab, see what else you can disable. A lot of things in here are not in the startup folder. Don't disable anything critical.

 

[Guest]

You can improve your startup time quite a lot by uninstalling the drivers for everything.
-uninstall your sound & graphics cards.
-Uninstall your IDE controllers and replace them with standart IDE,ESDI controller.
-Uninstall extra crap like AGP drivers, ACPI bios(replace it with a standard)
etc,etc

From the point where the bios finishes and windows first gets the computer, to when the desktop's up and all hard drive activity stops, I've had my athlon 600 achieve under 17 seconds with win98SE.

Unfortunantly your looking at a horrible 16 colour screen and you've got no sound. And your hard drives running slower than it can - but they're the tradeoffs.

You don't mention how long it's actually taking. My standard boot is normally around 40-50, if it's not longer than 70 seconds, I wouldn't worry about it.

 

[Bubba]

Instead of uninstalling all the drivers, just try booting up in Safe Mode. This does the same thing.
Press F8 during startup before Windows starts to load.

 

[Guest]

Safe mode is much slower on mine.

 

[BrainStorm]

1. If you have a Network card, see if it is seeking for a dynamic ip adress for nothing. (the major cause of long delays)

2. In the msdos.sys file, you can add the following line under "[OPTIONS]" : "BOOTDELAY=0". By default, Windows add a 2 seconds delay to boot time. (if it still exist in WinME)

3. Assing a static dimension to your page file(virtual memory), generally, the double of the amount of your RAM.

4. Try defragment your partitions.

 

[Guest]

Kuazi,

Before you go getting pschychotic and start pulling boards out of your computer, go to this link and read the sections for tweaking Windows Me. There are some interesting sections dealing with modifying your msdos.sys file to boot faster, and when in windows, ways to increase you optimization of memory handling. Read the whole article, even though it was written for Radeon users, it will enlighten you. Keep the rubber down!

http://www.rage3d.com/radeon/guide/#Tweaking

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by hdfreedom208 on 11/24/00 02:25 AM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[HarrY]

There are some fonts in Windows that you are never going to use or need. Take those out and put them in folder outside of the Windows system folder and that might help because fonts always seem to take a long time to load.

 

[lakedude]

Silly question:

How is your neighbor's software setup?

 

[Guest]

He has a pentium 3 800, 128 RAM, Asus P3v4x mobo and everything the same as me except the cd-rw. I re-installed windows and my bootup time is a LOT faster...i tried everything else and none of it worked, so i re-installed win-me, fresh off the disk on a HD i formated and tadaa! Thanx everyone for the help! I did learn a LOT about windows bootup sequences lol.

 

[Guest]

The BootDelay=0 trick still works in Windows Me, but most of the other well-known msdos.sys tricks have little, if any effect.

To make older versions of Windows boot nearly as fast as WinMe, add these options:
Logo=0
BootDelay=0
SystemReg=0
DisableLog=1
DrvSpace=0
DblSpace=0

My systems typically boot in well under 45 seconds, and I've gotten some as low as 15.
---
Dave Farquhar
Author, <i>Optimizing Windows for Games, Graphics and Multimedia</i> (O'Reilly)
<A HREF="http://thesiliconunderground.editthispage.com" target="_new">http://thesiliconunderground.editthispage.com</A>