Tech Olive

Surprisingly, few people know that Windows XP was designed with a 30 second boot as one of the main features (but not in Vista — weird). That was way back when we had 128 MB of RAM and single core CPUs. So shouldn’t computers nowadays with 4 GB of RAM and quad core CPUs boot in a matter of seconds? Well, the problem is we also have many more programs start up when Windows does and the sector on our disk where the boot is stored gets fragmented overtime, but here are a couple of tricks to speed up your boot.

We’ll begin by downloading a piece of software known as Microsoft BootVis.

Hit Trace > Next Boot + Driver Delays. The software will restart and trace your next boot and spit out several graphs that look like this.

They allow you to see whats taking the most time to boot and your final boot time in seconds.

First off, we need to remove all the useless software that boots with Windows. Hit Start > Run > msconfig > hit Enter. Go to the Startup tab. Here is a list of every program that starts with Windows. Go through every single one and Google the .exe. You’ll find things like raid drivers or Office pre-load tools, which, depending on your setup, are absolutely unneeded. Remove the check mark from next to programs that you don’t want to startup. Hit Apply > OK and then restart your machine.

Once done restarting, open up BootVis and do another Trace > Next Boot + Driver delays. You should see a significant lowering in boot time. Finally we’ll end by hitting Trace > Optimize. Your system will restart, defragment the boot, and then do another trace. With several more adjustments you should be able to boot in 30 seconds. Best of luck!

Image Credit: C4D Creations