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Boot time is among the most common empty-space in your daily life. You power on your CPU and wait for Windows to load and all you can do during it is stare your display screen. An average boot may take about 1 minute, but since I have lots of apps that get piled up on start-up it was about 2 min it is now 1 minute at my side. So I decided to reduce it.
After some Minutes of work, I slashed it down to almost 0:53 min i.e. a 54% decrease. How did I do it?
1. Using Soluto
Step 1. Download and install Soluto. It’s a freeware application for Windows that lets you understand your boot, discover which apps are slowing it down and then allows you to improve it.
Step 2. Measure your boot time with Soluto. It was 1:53 for my PC. It’ll come up with a list of applications that may be removed or delayed i.e., run an app after boot, when your PC is idle.
Step 3. Check out every single application from No-brainer and Potentially removable section and Ask yourself – Do I really need it? If no, then Remove them by Pausing them. (Don’t worry, you always can undo it later)
2. Using Microsoft Config. Utility
a) Utilizing Full Power of your Multiple-Core Processor
While booting, generally only one core of your processor is utilized. If you have a multiple-core processor, then you can utilize full power of it.
Step 1. Press Windows Key (
) + R and type “msconfig” and press Enter. This will open up MS System Config Utility Window.
Step 2. Open Boot tab and click on “Advanced Settings”. Check “No. of Processors:” and choose the maximum number from the drop-down menu. Click OK.
b) Removing services from Startup
Soluto may not be able to remove all services/applications on startup. So now open “Services” tab and check “Hide all Microsoft Services”. See what services are Running. Uncheck every service that’s not needed.
c) Removing Applications from Startup
Open “Startup” tab. Most of the apps must have already been removed by Soluto. But if anything is left, again ask yourself if you really need that app to launch upon Startup. If no, uncheck them and hit OK.
3. Removing Windows Boot Manager
Only try this if you don’t have more than one OS. There is no use of having the Windows Boot Manager when there is only Operating System Installed. You can disable (or re-enable) it as given:-
Click on Start and type “cmd”. Then press Ctrl + Shift + Enter. This will run it with Administrator privileges. Now, copy the following :-
bcdedit /set {bootmgr} displaybootmenu no
Paste it in Command Prompt Window (Right-clicking and select Paste). Then press enter and you’re done.
Note :- You can re-enable Boot Manager by changing the last word to yes i.e., :-
bcdedit /set {bootmgr} displaybootmenu yes
4. Enabling Quick-Boot in BIOS
Step 1. Restart your Computer. You’ll generally see a message like “Enter <key> to enter Setup” etc. If you don’t see it, here is a complete list of keys for different BIOS suppliers – http://michaelstevenstech.com/bios_manufacturer.htm
Step 2. In the BIOS Setup screen, navigate to Boot menu. Enable Quick Boot Mode.
Tip:- Also make sure that your Hard-Drive is set as the priority First Boot Device.
5. Miscellany Tips
Use less Fonts
Try to use less number of fonts. Fonts are loaded upon Startup of Windows. So uninstall fonts that you don’t use often. Fonts are located at X:WindowsFonts.
For an example, after removing 122 (220MB) Fonts out of 373 fonts that were installed, my avg. boot time was reduced by 6 seconds.
No GUI Boot
Though Disabling GUI (i.e., the Windows 7 Logo) from Boot won’t help much but, It will decrease boot-time by 2-5 seconds. To disable it, in Msconfig utility, open Boot tab and check “No GUI boot”.
Use an Anti-Virus that’s not Resource Hungry
Use an Anti-Virus that uses less resource and doesn’t delay boot-up by much seconds. AVs like Avast, McAfee, Trend Micro PC, Nod32, Windows Defender, Panda are among the AVs which are resource-friendly
More tips:
- Do Regular Scanning for Viruses, Web-roots and Spywares.
- Regular Disk Cleanup, Defragmentation and Scandisk is also recommended.
- If you have some money to spare, buy extra RAM or a better processor or a better HDD. Like a 7200 RPM HDD would be faster than a 3600 or 5400 RPM HDD.
Final Results
By following the above steps, my final average boot-up time was reduced to 0:53 minutes, i.e. a decrease of 60 seconds or 54%.
What’s your boot-up time? If you think you can beat my score, share it yours with me by leaving a comment.
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Dude tip number 4 was new for me ! Soluto is awesome
I am using it since 6 months back !!
Really worth software it is
Yeah it is. What’s your bootup time?
1:10 sec dude !!!
I know its not too less but i had to keep apache in startup as I am too lazy to launch delayed apps or paused ones
Soluto works well and yes it lemme knows whom to keep in boot and whom to kick out
Thats good. I had even tried to remove Apache and mySQL from the startup. Since then, they both aren’t running as they normally did. Gotta re-install it.
Same here;)
Ultimately was forced to re-install the same !!
By boot times are as follows/before tweeks
amd 3 gig cpu/8gig ram/ vista ultimate 64bit————-35 seconds from botton press to desktop screen
mac g5 dual cpu’s/4gig ram osx 10.5.1——————-53.3 seconds from botton press to desktop screen
ipad———————————-23 seconds
now i will try your tips and see what happens!!!!! thanks….i will repost my results…..
joe
Thats cool Joe, come back and post your new boot time.
Btw, from boot time, I mean average boot time. So make sure you test it 2-3 times
the 1st main factor determinant factor to a fast is the motherboard quality independently of chipset/cpu/”price” configuration
then
2nd the disk space 60% free or more to best results
3rd windows 7 pc must be allowed to idle at least once a week during a whole night
4rd defrag manually as tipicall
ah! forgot… keep CEIP enabled too…
this is the freeman tweak/approach to the problem.
Thanks for the tips.
Although i dont think point 2 is not entirely accurate. The PC uses ALL the cores by default. What that option allows you to do is select the number of cores to use and decrease it. Thats why when it isnt ticked, the box below is greyed out.
So changing it to the maximum number of cores, wont make a difference. Its already doing so!
Am I wrong anyone?
I can’t say much on this. I tried all the steps given here and it helped me reduce load time by seconds. No idea if step #2 was of much help
I very interesting guide. I would try it in my free time, thanks a lot!
What theme you are using?? Liked it. Can you share the link?
Hey Siyam, that’s a metro styled theme for Windows 7. You can find it here:
Download Windows 7 Metro (Zune) Theme Inspired by Windows Phone 7\
How about subscribing to my blog so that resources like these get sent to you when I publish them?
Please help! I have a dua core i5 Sony Vaio S notebook and when I went into msconfig to change the number of processors it only shows 1 in the dropdown menu. Any ideas? Thanks
Hey nick, I wish I could help you but I have no idea why this could be happening. It might be a hardware related issue
Dual core is a composed of 1 Physical CPU and 2 logical CPUs so that’s why it shows only 1. The C2D are 2 physical CPUs with 1 logical CPU.
Hope it helps
Thanks SuperSaid I understand now. Thanks aswell for a great guide I decreased my boot time from around 2 mins 40 sec to around 1 min 15 sec.
Thanks for some useful info. On my Quad core desktop, boot time reduced from 3:09 to 1:10 mins. A very good result.
Wow that’s a great improvement.
Tip #1 does absolutly nothing, windows already uses all cores and that option is solely for debugging purposes.
Appreciation for this ifnomariton is over 9000-thank you!