XP bootup times

After building a PC in work yesterday which booted a clean install of XP Professional in 8 seconds (yes, 8!) it made me wonder, what makes XP boot up slower on other machines? My laptop takes 4 times as long as that. The machine consisted of:

Athlon 64 X2 5200+ (clocked at 2.6GHz)
Asus M2N4 SLI motherboard (nForce chipset, NF4 me thinks)
2GB DDR2-800, I think it was CL5
500GB Samsung HD501LJ Serial ATA/300 hard disk
256MB GeForce 7600GS PCIe

What would have been the contributing factor to such a fast starting time? Makes me want to look at a new setup hehe.

8T8

Faster CPU & HD plus RAM are the obvious answers but the fact nothing has been installed on the OS also contributes.

As more and more software is loaded onto the machine that may have background services or require things to load on startup it will affect the boot up time. On a well maintained system the effect will be negligible but on a poorly kept one it can adversely effect the boot time. 2GB of RAM is generally the sweep spot for XP as well & helps a lot.

The laptop obviously has a slower HD to begin with so the best you can if you want to speed it up is to remove any software you really don't need anymore, do a defrag of the HD and check the startup section in msconfig to see what is loading and prune unnecessary entries. A RAM upgrade would also help quite a bit as well especially if the system has only 512MB in it.

Well even a clean install on my machine isn't that quick! It's a 2.0GHz Pentium M with 1.5GB DDR2-533 and a 160GB 5400rpm ATA100 drive. It just amazed me because I *never* saw anything start Windows that quickly.

humaxf1

does 8 seconds include the POST, motherboard logo etc etc and desktop fully loaded, ie no egg timer?

A good idea is to turn off the XP bloat look and switch to windows classic theme.

No, 8 seconds from when NTLDR starts. This machine was a new build, still had the XP themes and everything. I don't mess with too many settings before sending it out, it's not mine to play with!

mukki

humaxf1 wrote:

does 8 seconds include the POST, motherboard logo etc etc and desktop fully loaded, ie no egg timer?

A good idea is to turn off the XP bloat look and switch to windows classic theme.

eugh, install the "royal theme" instead, looks lovely, worth waiting for

op had you all the hardware set up, thinks like usb cd-roms realy delay the boot time

mukki

mukki wrote:

eugh, install the "royal theme" instead, looks lovely, worth waiting for

op had you all the hardware set up, thinks like usb cd-roms realy delay the boot time

I think Vista looks awful in the Windows 2000 scheme, it just doesn't suit it. Though the MCE Royale is quite nice.

The only drivers I had installed were the nForce chipset, HD Audio (I think ADI SoundMax) and the graphics. Enough to eliminate all of the unknown devices in Device Manager. One thing which stuck out was that the entire machine was Serial ATA only (including the DVD-RW), no IDE devices.