Speeding up laptop bootup times in Win 2000?

[Eug]

My PIII 600 laptop (with 256 MB) has a 4200 rpm drive (6 GB) but I'm not changing it any time soon.

I have two NICs, one wireless and one Ethernet/HomePNA, and I'll be disabling one to help with the bootup. I've also erased all unnecessary network protocols and all unnecessary background programs. A defrag is coming but last time I did that it didn't help much. Anything else?

I've been using hibernation, but my hibernation has been kinda glitchy.

EDIT:

In the 1 sec between pressing the submit button for my thread and the page appearing on my screen, two other threads were posted.

Hmmm...

 

[LocutusX]

I went through the same headaches last summer when a P3-500 laptop was my primary computer at work. The worst thing was the slow bootup times, no doubt due to the slow-as-hell 4200rpm hard drives. AFAIK, 4200rpm is really the only choice for notebooks, but I could be wrong. Anyways we couldn't really come up with any ways to improve bootup performance, it would take it's merry time (about 3 minutes) of hard drive grinding before we got the desktop. All of the machines had 192MB RAM though so once we were in Win2K the caching helped speed things up a bit.

It was only the bootup that was painful. I guess make good use of suspend-to-RAM/hibernate or something.

Edit: Maybe you can try some of those memory tweaks... such as DisableExecutivePaging or whatnot..

 

[bacillus]

can only suggest you put C: first in the boot order!

 

[Dug]

I believe disabling slave drives will help. (If you have nothing on the slave) I'm not on 2k right now to check, but I'm pretty sure it's in your device manager.

Go into your ATA controller tab, select properties, click on advanced properties. Under Device 1 select none.
Your Device 0 should be greyed out already because its in use.

Do this for both your primary and secondary controllers.
If your cd is a slave to your hard drive then you can disable your secondary controller.

The reason this speeds up boot times is because 2k will always scan for new devices unless you have selected none under the properties.

Another thing that can help is if you don't log in as an admin or equivelant.
Create a power user profile and use that. This will still allow you to basically do everything, but some of the extra's won't be loaded that the admin account requires.

 

[Eug]

Hmmm... I'll try some of those suggestions.

BTW, LocutusX, you can get 5400 rpm drives, but I can't justify the cost at the moment, and I dunno what that would do to my battery life either.

 

[Twilling]

My Laptop boots faster than all my other machines. I have a clean install of win2000 on the C drive. Specs: P3 600, 128mram 6gb compaq 1800xl. I only have one installed network card and it is attached to my home network...

My other desktops are: Celeron 300@ 450 256mram, 13g IBM 7200rpm,
AMD k6 450 @500, 256ram, 6.5 fujitsi 5400 rpm.....

 

[marcio]

My laptop (PII-366, 6GB HD, 288MB) boots in just under 2 minutes. When I use hibernation, which I usually do, it boots in 50 seconds.