Recipe 18.10. Improving Startup Performance

Problem

You want your system to start up more quickly.

Solution

When you turn on your PC, press the Delete, F1, or F10 keys (it varies by computer manufacturer) to get to the BIOS screen. Then make these choice and changes to your BIOS settings. Depending on your BIOS manufacturer, they will appear on different screens.

Quick Power-On Self-Test (POST)

When you choose this option, your system runs an abbreviated POST rather than the normal, lengthy one.

Boot Up Floppy Seek

Disable this option. When it is enabled, your system will spend a few extra seconds looking for your floppy drive a relatively pointless procedure, especially considering how infrequently you use your floppy drive.

Boot Delay

Some systems let you delay booting after you turn on your PC so that your hard drive gets a chance to start spinning before bootup. Most likely, you don't need to have this boot delay, so turn it off. If you run into problems, you can always turn it back on.

Discussion

When you turn on your PC, it goes through a set of startup procedures in its BIOS before it starts XP. So, if you speed up those initial startup procedures, you'll make your system start faster.

You can speed up your startup procedures by changing the BIOS with the built-in setup utility. How you run this utility varies from PC to PC, but you typically get to it by pressing the Delete, F1, or F10 keys. You'll come to a menu with a variety of choices.

You may also want to look in the Registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\SharedDLLs for DLLs loaded at startup from software that is no longer installed on your PC.

See Also

If you stop programs and services from running on startup, XP will start more quickly. See Recipe 18.9 for details.