After installing a fresh vista, formatting drives, removing all drivers and re-installing everything from scratch… my PC booted in exactly 60 seconds. Is that an achievement? I’m not sure, i’d be interested to hear how fast your vista boots up, but from what i gather, anything under a minute is rare. XP and 7 are completely different kettles of fish.
When i say boot – i mean from off completely to loading up google.com in a browser. Let’s face it, nobody cares about ‘boot time’ as in how long it takes to get to the desktop, most people want to know how long it takes to boot up, login and open up a webpage in a browser. Here’s what happened in those 60 seconds;
- Windows loaded.
- I had to enter a password (as would normally happen on a PC).
- I had to click on a firefox icon in which google was set to homepage.
I did all that in exactly 60 seconds, with some tweaks of course 😎
Previously, it would have taken me over 4 minutes to get to that stage, hence my frustration and the fresh install. 4 minutes is nothing though compared to the average Joe’s PC… if not looked after, do you have any idea of the amount of junk that runs on startup and eats up valuable resources on your PC? It’s unreal.
Even with a fresh installation of Vista, i had to make several tweaks to get it down to 60 seconds. Once i installed office 2007, cs4 and a few of my favourite programs, that 60 second boot time doubled to 120 seconds.
Not ideal… 2 minutes is a long time to look at a kettle boil 🙂 I’ve now managed to get it down to 90 seconds though. Here’s what i’ve done;
- disabled UAC
- enabled ‘no gui on boot’ – (this saved 20 me seconds by itself when booting up)
- set no of boot processors to 4
- disabled readyboost
- defragged hard drive
- disabled windows defender
- ran cCleaner to get rid of junk files
You’ll find out how to do all that here and here.
I did make more changes, but can’t remember them all now… those were all the major ones. I also wiped my harddrives completely including all drivers. Then i installed the latest versions & didn’t bother with all the dell crap that gets bundled with their PC’s.
I’ve yet to put on 30gigs of music and pictures, but when i do, i’ll defrag the harddrive again and record results. I’m expecting boot time to stay at around 90 seconds from now on and i’ll do my best to keep it that way.
Once windows 7 is up and running for a few months, i’ll probably upgrade to 64 bit windows 7 – that’ll unlock an extra 1 gig of RAM vista currently can’t use.