How could that have been done?

[Bizman]

Today I saw one quite an amazing computer: Athlon 1700+ @ 1.1 GHz, 256 Mb DDR 266 RAM, 384 - 768 Mb page file on a 40Gb 5400 rpm hard disk, GeForce 2 MX 200 video card, XP SP3. Nothing to play AH with...

The amazing part was it's speed: In way under 2 minutes from a cold start I was able to surf with Firefox! The pagefile usage was about 150 Mb, available RAM was over 100 Mb. How could that be possible?

Now, before anyone starts advertising Blackviper, I must say I know of that service disabling stuff. I have studied other trustworthy sites giving advice for a faster computer, too.

I started to dig things out. It appeared there was no antivirus program installed, and the Security Center had been set to "I control my antivirus program myself". There were about 36 running processes, including the D-Link program for the wireless USB dongle. Looking at the Services, it looked mostly like the original setup from a fresh install, only Indexing stuck my eye being disabled. FastUserSwitching, BITS and AutoUpdates were automatic and running. Then I looked at computer properties' Advanced section: "Let Windows decide" was ticked with every possible eye candy on.

So I put another 256 Mb stick in, set the pagefile to 768-768, installed Avast! antivirus, rebooted and looked at the Task Manager. As I had supposed, the antivirus program took it's share of available RAM, but the total was still only about 256 Mb used, pagefile usage still about 160 Mb.

Can anyone explain how to set up such a plain vanilla looking system working so fast with minimal resources? I've built and installed numerous XP rigs, lately the slowest been at the 2.4 GHz/1+ Gb range, but none of them could have outperformed this one. My usual tweaks concerning my client's machines include unticking most of the visual effects and disabling Error Reporting, reducing Internet settings not to save temporary files and setting swap to 1.5 x RAM. I'm not willing to sacrifice any normal functionality by disabling potentionally needed services. Any ideas?

[DREDIOCK]

36 processes is alot IMO

[Bizman]

36 processes is alot IMO

36 processes is at the lower end when speaking about ordinary people. What puzzles me, is that those 36 could easily be run with 256 Mb of RAM and a 384 Mb pagefile, both of which still having plenty of headroom.

[Skuzzy]

2 minutes is a long time from a cold start.  My home computer is up and running, at the desktop, in under 10 seconds (reboot time is 6 seconds) from a cold start.

I will never post what I do to make that happen as it is a complex process (involves hardware and software) and one misstep could have one starting all over again.

[Ghosth]

Clean well built system should go from power off, cold to desktop able to browse or whatever in a Minute, in some cases under.

Some of it is in the hardware you choose, a lot of it is in not letting loads of software start with windows.

[Bizman]

I know 2 minutes may sound long, but that's the time a normal household computer running XP takes from pressing the button to the point when the system is idle. By "normal" I mean a fully updated clean install the Microsoft way with antivirus, firewall, Java and Flash, capable to browser gaming, mailing, banking, youtubeing and even facebooking, to name a few things ordinary people might want to do with their computers.

To my experience, getting to the welcome screen usually takes a minute. I don't know much how to safely shorten that time, since I don't know which system tasks can be disabled under certain circumstances.

After the welcome screen, I know how to prevent background programs from starting and doing their updating routines. That part is mostly a compromise between speed and easiness and the consequences of each choice are easy to understand.

Skuzzy, from what I've read about your computers, you seem to have specifically tailored systems for different tasks. Am I right to claim, that an untweaked Windows is capable of doing all possible things equally poorly?

[Skuzzy]

My personal computer runs everything very well.

The only thing I do which is application specific, is to configure my video editors to use multiple disks (one for temp, one for render, one for the original...).

There is nothing, OS specific, I do to my home computers to make them favor any software over another.

[ImADot]

Hey Skuzzy,

Can you come up here to Minnesota and get my computers to start up faster? We've already melted most of what little snow we've already had, and it's looking like a very good possibility for a brown Xmas this year. You might only need a light jacket... 

[guncrasher]

Hey Skuzzy,

Can you come up here to Minnesota and get my computers to start up faster? We've already melted most of what little snow we've already had, and it's looking like a very good possibility for a brown Xmas this year. You might only need a light jacket... 

he can come to los angeles, we'll take him surfing on new years  .  the life jacket is bullet proof  .

semp

[gyrene81]

I know 2 minutes may sound long, but that's the time a normal household computer running XP takes from pressing the button to the point when the system is idle. By "normal" I mean a fully updated clean install the Microsoft way with antivirus, firewall, Java and Flash, capable to browser gaming, mailing, banking, youtubeing and even facebooking, to name a few things ordinary people might want to do with their computers.

windows xp sp3 with everything you mention hardware and software wise...should be fully booted to desktop idle in ~60 seconds or so. What is causing your 2 minute time is the amount of ram. The paging file is bigger than the amount of ram which means everything is being swapped to disk then back to memory. If you were to add another 256mb of ram you would see a faster boot time, make it a full gigabyte and it would work like it's supposed to.

[MrRiplEy[H]]

A 5400rpm 40gb harddrive is mighty slow. That explains the slow boot time. Granted the low ram has some to do with it - I just booted my windows7 home premium to desktop in 2 minutes 16 secs using 256Mb ram. Using 1Gb ram it took 2 minutes 3 seconds. A 13 second improvement by using four times the ram. Using 4 Gb of ram, 1 min 55 secs.

So I think it's fair to say the gimped i/o of virtual disk combined to the slow laptop harddrive is the limiting factor here. By contrast my desktop win7 with raid0 boot drive boots in 27 seconds flat (time used to login included) using 4 gigs of ram.

The paging file is bigger than the amount of ram which means everything is being swapped to disk then back to memory.

Actually Bizman said the used pagefile was 100mb and free ram at boot was also around 100mb. The allocated pagefile size is no indicator of anything. I can make my pagefile 5mb or 50 gigabytes at will.

[Bizman]

The paging file is bigger than the amount of ram which means everything is being swapped to disk then back to memory. If you were to add another 256mb of ram you would see a faster boot time, make it a full gigabyte and it would work like it's supposed to.

I may not have expressed myself clearly enough. The original amount of RAM was 256 mb, available RAM was about 128 and pagefile usage below 160. So the paging file was about half of the amount of RAM, not double. And yet only half of the total amount of RAM was in use. And the trend continued when I doubled the RAM and pagefile plus added an antivirus program.

I was trying to say it was astonishingly fast for the specs.

Which leads me to another question: When clocking the boot time, do you have all startup programs disabled? My two minutes includes at least antivirus up and running. I work with ordinary people's computers. People like your granny: Having an icon on desktop saying "Internet" and another "Mail". People who say they can't access the 'net while in fact their computer won't boot at all.   I have to speak to them with terms from hand plough era to make them understand anything computer related...

[MrRiplEy[H]]

I may not have expressed myself clearly enough. The original amount of RAM was 256 mb, available RAM was about 128 and pagefile usage below 160. So the paging file was about half of the amount of RAM, not double. And yet only half of the total amount of RAM was in use. And the trend continued when I doubled the RAM and pagefile plus added an antivirus program.

I was trying to say it was astonishingly fast for the specs.

Which leads me to another question: When clocking the boot time, do you have all startup programs disabled? My two minutes includes at least antivirus up and running. I work with ordinary people's computers. People like your granny: Having an icon on desktop saying "Internet" and another "Mail". People who say they can't access the 'net while in fact their computer won't boot at all.   I have to speak to them with terms from hand plough era to make them understand anything computer related...

The difference you see may be related to device drivers. Some drivers are really bloated and eat up ram at boot. Some drivers are not properly installed so the OS hangs while detecting hardware at boot etc.

I'm pretty confident the secret to Skuzzys fast boot times is that he has optimized his bootup process so that windows doesn't try to detect drivers and he manually made sure everything is in the correct place. That's why he also can't give tips on how to do it because people would render their worm boxes unbootable instantly.

[Skuzzy]

The difference you see may be related to device drivers. Some drivers are really bloated and eat up ram at boot. Some drivers are not properly installed so the OS hangs while detecting hardware at boot etc.

I'm pretty confident the secret to Skuzzys fast boot times is that he has optimized his bootup process so that windows doesn't try to detect drivers and he manually made sure everything is in the correct place. That's why he also can't give tips on how to do it because people would render their worm boxes unbootable instantly.

Not quite correct.  I start with a slip streamed copy of Windows XP w/SP3, so no drivers are loaded that are not needed.  It also contains the 100+ patches so I do not waste time in Windows Update after installation.

The single best improvement is how well I synchronize the speed of my hard disks to the speed of system RAM in order to reduce wait state padding and I/O delay insertions.


You now how the Windows XP boot screen has the 'Cylon' eye (the graphic which pulses across a bar)?  From the start, I only see it make it about 3/4 the way across, in the first (and only) pass and then I am at my desktop.  My system has 19 processes in the background, after booting.

[MrRiplEy[H]]

The single best improvement is how well I synchronize the speed of my hard disks to the speed of system RAM in order to reduce wait state padding.


You now how the Windows XP boot screen has the 'Cylon' eye (the graphic which pulses across a bar)?  From the start, I only see it make it about 3/4 the way across, in the first (and only) pass and then I am at my desktop.

Even though I'm not a windows power user anymore this sounds very intriguing. It would be very interesting to hear how you do the syncing, I assume it's not only a matter of increasing speed. But I understand if you do not feel like writing a novel about it.