woooohoo!

[tterris]

and they were right when they said you feel much better about yourself and your system when you do it yourself instead of having some foreign migrant worker do it for you!

i have a few questions, and might have a few more as time goes on..

firstly, my boot time isn't that great... it's something like 30-35 seconds to get to the desktop screen from the time i press the power button, what can i do in the bios to make the boot go faster. oh, and i should mention i'm using an amd3500, upgraded from a p3 1ghz. the odd thing about it was i booted up on the 1ghz in less than 30 seconds (on windows ME), so there has to be a way i can get the boot time down.

in the bios i have what i thought would make for the quickest boot time: i have my hard drive boot first, then my optical drives, then my floppy.. is this the best configuration or is something else better?

if it might help any of you to help me then i'll list my system specs.

winchester 3500+
samsung 160gb 7200 sata
512 megs of pdp patriot w/ xbl (will buy one more stick sometime in the not too distant future)
geforce2 ultra (waiting on new vid card)
1 dvd drive and 1 dvdrw drive
1 floppy drive
msi neo2

front fan/back fan, vantec (FRIGGIN MAELSTROM HURRICANE tornado -- can't hear myself think -- thinking about swapping it out for something a bit less noisy) on xp90 hs

oh, one more question came to me... i see all these pictures of CPU-Z system specs: is this something i have to download or does it come included with win xp?

and i want to put my cpu under some stress to test it out.. what programs were good for this again? was it prime95? list me some cpu stress test progs and where i can get 'em and i'll be your best fiend!
plzz
thanks and goodnight

 

[stelleg151]

good stuff, but I would definately get another stick asap, because that will generally very noticable difference in general usage.

 

[biostud]

Put harddrives before CD-drives in the boot setup in the BIOS.

 

[fuzzynavel]

identify where the longest part of the bootup sequence is....i.e is it spending 20 second on the bios screen while searching for drives and then a fast 10 second boot into windows.... or does it spend ages loading firewall antivirus etc when windows is loading....

Personally mine takes about 10 seconds getting to windows and then about 40 seconds loading all my crap for my taskbar etc and mounting drives and finding network connections..(i know I should write a script to speed it up)!

You could always go to start menu and go to the run command and type "Msconfig"...you can then choose what programs you want to run at startup.....see if it helps....

Incidentally....do you have a home LAN?? asking the DHCP server for IP addys adds a few seconds to the boot time!


Hope this helps!

 

[dguy6789]

Use this program:

http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=2495

Have it clean the prefetch, then disable it. Your system will now boot up faster then a 4 raptor raid system

 

[tterris]

ok thanks dguy i'll try that.

fuzzynavel: the majority of the time is spent loading the bios and booting up the drives--probably 20 seconds worth. once the black screen with the windows xp logo comes on it takes about 12 seconds, but after the welcome screen flashes it instantly jumpes to desktop and loads all the icons quickly.

 

[bob4432]

don't worry about boot time, who cares if it takes 30 seconds or 1 minute, what matters is how it runs when it is running. goodl cpu-z for that program. for stressing get prime95 and run it in the torture mode for about 24 hours. i always feel it is better to f@ck stuff when i still have a warranty, so all of my new builds get memtest for atleast 24hours and then prime95 torture test for 24 hours. if it does this without any errors, you have a good base

 

[kornphlake]

I've turned off the second and third boot devices, although I have a floppy drive for some reason, I'll never boot off of it, the same would go for my CD drives, if I do need to do a re-install or something I change the CD drive to the first boot device before starting. Also you can disable the memory check and cut a couple of seconds off too.

 

[tterris]

hmmm.. what exactly does booting a drive do then? i thought that in order for it to be functional, it had to be booted. however you're telling me that i can still use the floppy and optical drives without booting them. what gives?

another question: what prog do you guys use to monitor your cpu and case temps from within windows?

 

[asm0deus]

there might be an option in the bios called boot other devices, maybe turn that off too, there's also an option for fast bootup where it doesnt detect any drives and just uses the same settings you had last time, enable that too. dont let it auto detect the drives because once it does it and you're not changing them around then you should be good, also disable any unnecessary services in windows. I just built a new A64 rig myself and have to do some of this same stuff too

 

[jterrell]

Try this link.

http://www.schadentech.com/Oth...20Boot/Shutdown%20Time

It trimmed my startup and shutdown times by about half.

 

[kornphlake]

The drives will work if they don't boot, all the boot sequence does is scan the drive for an operating system if it doesn't find one then it will search the next drive, if you only specify one drive and that one drive is the drive you have your operating system on now and forever you eliminate a step. Back in the days of DOS it was useful to set the A: drive to be a first boot device because some programs didn't want DOS installed, by scanning the floppy drive first you could load another operating system by simply putting a flopy disk with an operating systm in the drive, or if you wanted to get into DOS you could just turn on the computer without a floppy in the drive, after scanning the drive it would then check the harddisc and find the DOS operating system there.

The drives won't work if you don't have drivers for them, make sure not to delete or disable those.

 

[nick1985]

thumbsup;

 

[bob4432]

why are you all so obsessed with how fast/slow a machine boots? it has absolutely no bearing on the performance of the machine.