Is it just my imagination???

[brucehao]

A buddy and I have virtually identical systems, but he has 1gb of ram and I have 512mb or the same exact ram. I can swear that his computer seems to boot up a lot quicker than mine. Specifically, the splash screen and the system checks before Windows XP pro is actually loaded seem to happen in a blink of an eye. Whereas, my system takes a few seconds to run those checks.

Should the ram make a difference in this situation?

 

[mechBgon]

Have you defragmented your hard drive a few times? Might help.

 

[Erasmus-X]

I highly doubt that more installed RAM makes all that difference in your buddy's boot-up time. I'm actually willing to wager that it has lot more to do with differences in his software configuration.

Have you done all the common WinXP speed tweaks? Go to TweakXP. That place has a WEALTH of information on how to fine-tune XP. Microsoft had also released a boot-up optimizer (the name of it escapes me right now) that works surprisingly well. TweakXP has a link to it on their site somewhere.

BTW mechBgon, when's the last time you actually degragmented an 80+ GB hard drive? You can literally waste away a whole day waiting for that to get done. In my personal experience in doing defrags, its marginal benefits hardly justify the time spent doing it. An old time AT forum guy, Modus (I haven't really seen him pop his head around much lately) actually wrote a pretty in-depth analysis of the real-world benefits of defragmenting. I wish I had a link to it, but his study concluded that defragmenting is an overrated resolution to lackluster system performance. Some people will spend hours on end defragmenting their hard drive and will be stoked over the half a second they saved in seek time afterwards. But for me, what the heck is the point?

 

[wtfiwwm]

Some people will spend hours on end defragmenting their hard drive and will be stoked over the half a second they saved in seek time afterwards. But for me, what the heck is the point?

exactly!

 

[jackschmittusa]

I have to disagree on the defrag issue. Defragging and reordering files can make a difference. Also how is it a waste of time if it is done unattended? Start it before you go to bed.

 

[mechBgon]

Originally posted by: Erasmus-X
I highly doubt that more installed RAM makes all that difference in your buddy's boot-up time. I'm actually willing to wager that it has lot more to do with differences in his software configuration.

Have you done all the common WinXP speed tweaks? Go to TweakXP. That place has a WEALTH of information on how to fine-tune XP. Microsoft had also released a boot-up optimizer (the name of it escapes me right now) that works surprisingly well. TweakXP has a link to it on their site somewhere.

BTW mechBgon, when's the last time you actually degragmented an 80+ GB hard drive? You can literally waste away a whole day waiting for that to get done. In my personal experience in doing defrags, its marginal benefits hardly justify the time spent doing it. An old time AT forum guy, Modus (I haven't really seen him pop his head around much lately) actually wrote a pretty in-depth analysis of the real-world benefits of defragmenting. I wish I had a link to it, but his study concluded that defragmenting is an overrated resolution to lackluster system performance. Some people will spend hours on end defragmenting their hard drive and will be stoked over the half a second they saved in seek time afterwards. But for me, what the heck is the point?

I've never owned an 80Gb drive, being more of a 15000rpm-SCSI type of guy, but my understanding is that WinXP (which I've never owned either) makes a very strong effort to put the startup files in the most linear order possible when you run the defragger. See StorageReview's "Is RAID0 Really Worth It?" for a little more info on that. So launch the defragger at bedtime, and let it run

 

[Confused]

Also, if you keep it defragged often, then it won't take too long.

It'll only be the very first time you run it that it will take a long time, but every time after that it won't have too much to do

 

[bendixG15]

Probably a software issue

How about checking the BIOS settings ???????

Then there's the startup programs...they take time to load

Hey, good luck

 

[Sid59]

if you run XP ,,, you should check out BootVis

 

[Erasmus-X]

BootVis! That's the program I was thinking of.....

I've never owned an 80Gb drive, being more of a 15000rpm-SCSI type of guy, but my understanding is that WinXP (which I've never owned either) makes a very strong effort to put the startup files in the most linear order possible when you run the defragger. See StorageReview's "Is RAID0 Really Worth It?" for a little more info on that. So launch the defragger at bedtime, and let it run

That statement would be somewhat true if your drive is formated for the NTFS file system. But no matter how good the file system, fragmentation will still always be a problem. Defragmenting made a lot more sense back in the mid-90's when hard drives were slow, had small platter densities, and only spinned at 4,500 rpm. But it makes less and less of a difference with the large drives of today that have 40 GB platters, large buffers, and 7,200 rpm motors.

Working in the computer repair business, I've seen more technicians blame performance problems on fragmented hard drives than any other cause. But as we all know, there's dozens of factors that contribute to overall speed. You can be running a P4 3.06 GHz chip with 1 GB of DDR RAM, but if you have enough background processes and cheap Windows frills running in the background to make your head spin, it's going to perform like crap. I recently optimized a brand new Compaq Presario for a customer that was decked out like that; OEM's load all kinds of garbage on their systems -- half of which are totally unnecessary. That system was twice as responsive when I got done with it.

 

[everman]

Use bootVis. It works very nicely.

 

[mechBgon]

Originally posted by: Erasmus-X
BootVis! That's the program I was thinking of.....

I've never owned an 80Gb drive, being more of a 15000rpm-SCSI type of guy, but my understanding is that WinXP (which I've never owned either) makes a very strong effort to put the startup files in the most linear order possible when you run the defragger. See StorageReview's "Is RAID0 Really Worth It?" for a little more info on that. So launch the defragger at bedtime, and let it run

That statement would be somewhat true if your drive is formated for the NTFS file system. But no matter how good the file system, fragmentation will still always be a problem. Defragmenting made a lot more sense back in the mid-90's when hard drives were slow, had small platter densities, and only spinned at 4,500 rpm. But it makes less and less of a difference with the large drives of today that have 40 GB platters, large buffers, and 7,200 rpm motors.

Working in the computer repair business, I've seen more technicians blame performance problems on fragmented hard drives than any other cause. But as we all know, there's dozens of factors that contribute to overall speed. You can be running a P4 3.06 GHz chip with 1 GB of DDR RAM, but if you have enough background processes and cheap Windows frills running in the background to make your head spin, it's going to perform like crap. I recently optimized a brand new Compaq Presario for a customer that was decked out like that; OEM's load all kinds of garbage on their systems -- half of which are totally unnecessary. That system was twice as responsive when I got done with it.

Hear, hear... that pre-loaded Compaq stuff = evil! :Q

This is what I was referring to at SR.com, by the way...

Unsurprisingly, the dual-drive RAID 0 solution delivers double the sequential transfer rate of a single unit. The SR Office, High-End, and Gaming DriveMarks, however, all climb by less than 10%. Also consider the fact that the RAID array boasts double the capacity of the single drive: as a result, some of that performance increase we see between the single drive and the RAID array simply comes from the larger capacity and resultant shorter actuator travel distances. Is this worth twice the cost plus the cost of the controller?

A notable exception arises within the SR Bootup DriveMark 2002. Windows XP tracks the order of requests during the boot process and does its best to reorder data found on a drive to facilitate sequential reads as a system starts up. Since the Bootup DriveMark 2002 trace was captured from a system that had been restarted and defragmented many times, this individual test likely reflects the transfer rate advantage that one achieves through RAID 0. Therefore, if the primary purpose of one's machine is to start Windows XP, RAID 0 offers overwhelming performance benefits.