How to Speed Up Booting Time of Windows XP or Vista
Booting Time always annoys many people, especially when it takes ages to get into your operating system. This can be tweaked to speed up booting time in XP and Vista. It involves a simple procedure involving small tricks. To do this, Follow the following steps..
1. Open notepad.exe, type "del c:\windows\prefetch\ntosboot-*.* /q" (without the quotes) & save as "ntosboot.bat" in c:\
2. From the Start menu, select "Run…" & type "gpedit.msc".
3. Double click "Windows Settings" under "Computer Configuration" and double click again on "Shutdown" in the right window.
4. In the new window, click "add", "Browse", locate your "ntosboot.bat" file & click "Open".
5. Click "OK", "Apply" & "OK" once again to exit.
6. From the Start menu, select "Run…" & type "devmgmt.msc".
7. Double click on "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers"
8. Right click on "Primary IDE Channel" and select "Properties".
9. Select the "Advanced Settings" tab then on the device or 1 that doesn’t have ‘device type’ greyed out select ‘none’ instead of ‘autodetect’ & click "OK".
10. Right click on "Secondary IDE channel", select "Properties" and repeat step 9.
11. Reboot your computer and you can see the difference.
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October 6th, 2008 at 5:55 pm
I’m sorry. But your tip involving clearing out the Prefetch folder is IMHO, not correct.
Windows automatically clears out entries from the Prefetch folder depending on your usage.
See here - http://blogs.msdn.com/ryanmy/archive/2005/05/25/421882.aspx
So, in fact by clearing out the Prefetch folder, you’re resetting your usage stats and that’s all.
October 6th, 2008 at 6:06 pm
WRT to the other tip, it might save a second or two, but the user will need to remember to reset it to Auto-detect back again, if installing a new peripheral on that channel.
Also, this won’t hold true if all your channels are already having peripherals, right?
correct me, if I’m wrong please.
October 6th, 2008 at 7:23 pm
If you are having a really sluggish boot up then its also good to make sure that you have defragmented your hard drive. A badly fragmented hard drive can really slow down your boot time
October 6th, 2008 at 9:22 pm
Hmm, I think it is messy for a novice user to edit the windows configuration.
October 6th, 2008 at 9:48 pm
@Sparx..
This will hold true if your channels are holding peripherals.. Try it once..
@jgoto..
Ya.. Defragmenting Hard Disk is the best option.. This is more advanced..
@kuanhoong..
Yes.. But these days no body is a novice user..
October 7th, 2008 at 10:26 am
[...] How to speed up booting time of windows XP or Vista [...]
October 8th, 2008 at 6:32 am
BAD IDEA
A more appropriate name for this tweak would be “Boot Win XP Slowly”, because that is exactly what it will do. Steps 1-5 will create a script that will delete the “NTOSBOOT-B00DFAAD.pf” file on every shutdown. This file is used to guide the boot prefetch operation that takes place during the moving bar animation. If the file is deleted this can not take place and the animation will take very little time. This is what convinces many people that the boot process is faster. Don’t be fooled.
The files that were normally loaded during prefetch must be loaded. If this can not be done by prefetch, it will be done later on during the boot sequence. But now it will be done much less efficiently and take longer. If the boot process is timed with a stop-watch it will be clearly seen that it is slower.
Steps 6-10 will remove a small delay during boot. It will also disable a second hard drive or CD if present. So beware!
Don’t be fooled like the author was, give this tip all the attenton it deserves - none.
Larry Miller
Microsoft MCSA
October 8th, 2008 at 10:55 am
@Larry..
I have checked this tip and it worked for me. Anyways I will check your information and will update my post if needed.