Faster Boot?

[iolair]

Is there anyway to make Windows 2000 boot faster? I've turned off all the services I can, but I'm still getting boot times of over 1.5 minutes. I can boot an identical machine running Unix in 45 seconds. TIA.

Iolair MacWalter
Director of IT

 

[afitzroy]

When the pc's run slow at my location I normally do a complete system clean up.

- Using something like Startup Control Panel I clean the start menu.
- Use a registry clean to clean and defrag the registry
- Manually delete cookies, temp, internet temp folder.
- and do a 20 min defrag (unless you have time for a full defrag).

I do other small things that help but these help the most.

 

[chipk]

Move your hard drive in your BIOS to be your first boot device if it's not already. This will bypass floopy and cdrom check and speed up a little bit. You may want to attempt starting in safe mode/debug and see if you can watch which drivers it hangs on loading.

 

[iolair]

Thanks. Great tips. I haven't run regclean in a while. Will that defrag the registry? Everything else looks good now, and it did speed up a bit. I'm using NTFS. Would Fat32 be faster? I don't really need the security of NTFS on this particular machine. The drive is 20GB in size.

Iolair MacWalter
Director of IT

 

[erikhertzel]

I don't not think that Fat32 would be a whole lot faster, if any. I would recommend using the following:

http://www.stevengould.org/software/cleanup

Then, if you can put more RAM in and that will help W2K a ton in boot speed. I have seen that more times that I can count. And, your UNIX/LINUX machines will still boot faster than your Win machines, but this will help.

Best regards.

Erik

 

[chipk]

I don't think you can't go back to Fat32 without reformatting.

Regclean just gets rid of orphaned entries in the registry that don't have programs or files associated with them any more.

 

[iolair]

Thanks to all. I've only got 384MB of ram, so that's probably the problem. I've gotten it to boot in 1 minute and 30 seconds, and that's going to be the max. Oh well, I'll just have to live with it. Yes, from what I've read, you would have to reformat to go back to Fat32.

Iolair MacWalter
Director of IT

 

[2ffat]

To defrag your Registry and paging, try PageDefrag by Sysinernals. (

http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/PageDefrag.html)

I also remember reading about a Registry setting that would decrease the amount of time the startup screen is displayed. I'll look around and see what I can see.



James P. Cottingham
-----------------------------------------
^{I'm number 1,229!
I'm number 1,229!}

 

[wolluf]

2k is probably the slowest booting version of windows - and I doubt you'll make a serious difference cleaning the registry or adding more RAM (384 should be absolutely fine, as I presume you won't have a ton of apps starting with windows, as you're concerned about startup speed).

If you want faster boot - upgrade to XP.

 

[Sival]

Maybe turn it off less and use hybernate instead? Still not sizzling fast, but faster than normal boot.

 

[j0ckser]

what about logging off or going to standby. i turned hibernate off on my laptop as the system seems to wake up very sluggishly (is that really a word?) i go to standby all the time and it works really well.

my 2 bits worth...

per ardua ad astra

 

[iolair]

Yes, sluggishly is a word. I'll try standby and logging off. I did try hibernate, and it seemed to take as long as booting did. So, I'll give standby a try. Thanks to all who responded.

By the way, wolluf, I had always heard that you should have at least 512MB of ram for XP. I know the box says 128, but that's just to run it, and I've heard most people say that the best minimum for XP is 512. Any thoughts? I don't multitask very much, usually do one thing, close it, then open something else.

Iolair MacWalter
Director of IT

 

[wolluf]

XP will run fine with 384MB with the usage you describe, and assuming you don't have major resource hogs like Norton or McAfee internet security/anti-virus running (you can check in task manager to see what your usage of RAM/pagefile is). After clean install of XP on recent machine before you've installed anything else, you'll probably have c. 100MB RAM in use when you logon. After installing a decent AV (eg, AVG) and anti-spyware (eg Windows Defender/Microsoft antispyware) that will rise to c. 150MB. Obviously if you add more apps that run from logon, that base figure increases. But if you start with 150, then on 384 machine you've obviously got over 200MB RAM free before you get the slowdowns associated with using the pagefile (this is a bit simplistic, as XP uses pagefile before running out of RAM - but its reasonable in general terms).

 

[iolair]

Thanks. I probably do need to do a clean install anyway. It's time.

Iolair MacWalter
Director of IT

 

[Frank4d]

There is an article in the May 2006 issue of Maximum PC that addresses this issue. I can't copy it here, so I will summarize the steps here:
- Clean un-needed crap out of the All Users and yourname Startup folders
- In BIOS, choose fast boot
- In BIOS, skip the memory test
- Turn off un-needed services
- Edit boot.ini to display the list of boot options for 0 seconds.
- Delete everything in C:\Windows\Prefetch. Then in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SessionManager\MemeoryManagement\PrefetchParameters change the DWORD value to "3" and reboot.

 

[iolair]

Thanks. There is no C:\Windows\Prefetch, so should I add that? Should I add the registry key, since it doesn't exist either? I do have the bios turned to fastboot, no memory test. The problem is occuring on Windows loading, because when I boot with Unix, the system boots very quickly.

What does the "server" service do? This is not a server, do I need it? Also, what is the Windows Management Instrumentation service? Does Microsoft have documentation for what all the services do on their website?

Iolair MacWalter
Director of IT

 

[wolluf]

iolair - I think Frank4d's post refers to an XP machine (2k is similar but doesn't have prefetch).

You can find lots of sites with advice about which services you can turn off (most are for XP, but generally apply to 2k as well - certainly where the services exist in 2k - eg (from a quick google) -

http://www.activewin.com/editorials/alex_harris/2.shtml.

As I said earlier - 2k is probably slowest booting windows, so there's more of a limit to how far you can improve it. XP was specifically designed to boot faster.