Thinkpads Forum

My T40 can take over 2 minutes to cold boot to a useable desktop. That's too darn long!

I'm loading up the following:
Norton Antvirus Corporate 8
Access Connections
Battery Maximizer
UltraNav drivers
Centrino Hardware Control

Usually I just use hibernate to shut down the system, which reduced startup time to about 15 seconds, but when I install new software and have to reboot, the machine is maddeningly slow.

I guess my 4200RPM HDD is really bogging things down. How fast are your boot times and what speed HDD are you running?

My T41 with 7200 rpm hard drive takes that long. I worry more (vastly more) about speed of operation once running. If the machine is on, and I want it "off" but back on again soon, I just suspend it. At night, I shut it down and in the morning, it is two or three minutes before it is ready to go. I like the services it loads and how it performs, so I just ignore the startup time. ... JD Hurst

Ah ok, so it's not just me then! I thought maybe I was running too many extra things in the background, but I've gone through all the applications I have running and there wasn't anything else I could disable without compromizing functionality.

I did give iTunes 6 the boot, in favor of EPHPod

iTunes 6 is restricted to my desktop, where it won't slow things down!

You can run Microsoft's bootvis utility. On my T23 it decreased the boot-up time by about 25 seconds. Boot time from power button to usable desktop is about 1:15s.

Here's another thought:

I have noticed that with my 600 (running 98SE), it takes longer to boot if I have one of my PCMCIA ethernet cards installed. When one's in the slot, it seems to cause the boot process to pause for about 30 seconds or so. I've also noticed that it doesn't come out of suspend most of the time when my 10/100 card's installed.

I have all my ethernet cards' TCP/IP settings set up for DHCP, so I'm beginning to suspect that the problem is that it's sitting around, waiting for a server or something to respond to it and only continues when it times out. Since I don't usually have any of these in the machine, I haven't really given it much thought.

Don't know if this is of any help on a T40 or not, but might be good thinking fodder...

Rob

I have had the luxury (?) of having Dell and other no-name computers to fix. Starting with a retail XP CD and installing it, these machines will boot very fast. No services, mind you, but fast. With the three basic services (NIC, Audio and Video), they will still boot quickly. Then as I add firewall and antivirus security, DHCP services and possibly Domain connection, Office and Adobe startup functions, the whole startup process slows down. This is why I said I focus more on working performance. So long as the machine performs admirably, then I don't get fussed on startup.
... JD Hurst

Rob Mayercik wrote:Here's another thought:

I have noticed that with my 600 (running 98SE), it takes longer to boot if I have one of my PCMCIA ethernet cards installed. When one's in the slot, it seems to cause the boot process to pause for about 30 seconds or so. I've also noticed that it doesn't come out of suspend most of the time when my 10/100 card's installed.

I have all my ethernet cards' TCP/IP settings set up for DHCP, so I'm beginning to suspect that the problem is that it's sitting around, waiting for a server or something to respond to it and only continues when it times out. Since I don't usually have any of these in the machine, I haven't really given it much thought.

Don't know if this is of any help on a T40 or not, but might be good thinking fodder...

Rob

With Win9x while it aquires a DHCP lease, the whole thing sit's and waits until it get's a valid IP or it times out. The only fix for that is to go static. The problem does not appear in NT, 2000 or XP as they have a real network layer built in as opposed to taped on as an afterthought.

I'd try sysinternals "Autoruns" tool. Normally slow boot times are caused by services that run in background with no interaction with the desktop. Another way of increasing speed is to stop the server service - if you don't need to run it (from a command line type "net stop server").

Also symantec antivirus runs a little local proxy called "CCProxy" (if you download the TCPview tool from sysinternals you can see this. It can slow down network connections if you don't have enough ram. I am debating removing symantec for this reason and installing a non-network invasive anti-virus tool (since symantec anti-virus is useless if you are using an encrypted IMAP or SMTP connection).

I gave bootvis a try and asked it to optimize the placement of booting files. I don't think I saw much of a difference in boot time, but I'm going to run tests again to make sure!

Thanks for the suggestion though

Edit - still takes a bit over two minutes to reach a usable desktop. Bootvis clocked it at roughly 2:05 before the HDD activity ceased enough for me to actually open applications

Good thing I usually just put the system into Hibernate when I want to shut it off!

Temetka wrote:You can run Microsoft's bootvis utility. On my T23 it decreased the boot-up time by about 25 seconds. Boot time from power button to usable desktop is about 1:15s.

The time from the second the IBM BOS screen shows to the time Windows is booted and usable is 71 seconds on my 760ED. It's running Windows 98SE.

My 380ED has Windows XP Pro booted in about a minute, sometimes two, give or take.

From cold boot to "select user" in windows xp takes my R40 about 30 seconds. From there to a usable windows xp desktop approximately an additional 1.5 minutes (I start avast anti-virus and copernic desktop search, access connections, etc) - that is the time it takes to lose the hour-glass cursor...So that seems in line with what you are seeing I think.

My X40 will take at least two minutes to get from power-on password to when everything completely finishes loading (last thing to load is usually Copernic Desktop Search). 'Server' service set to start automatically, but I think I only need when I run baseline secrity analyiser from Microsoft.

My TP takes only about 45 secs to boot... from pressing the power button until the hard drive LED stops flashing. I didn't disable any services but I did remove a lot of preinstalled software that runs at startup. I regularly run WindowWasher, run Disk Cleanup, clean the registry with jv16PowerTools and Registry Defragmenter, and defragment my drive using PerfectDisk. I also tweaked my system using Ashampoo PowerUp XP. I think the combination of reducing startup items, tweaking the OS and regularly cleaning the file system and registry did the trick.

I agree with jdhurst's comments, but would add a couple of observations.

First, if boot times really are a big problem, seriously consider a faster drive.

Second, consider Black Viper's service information (currently available at http://web.archive.org/web/200410190818 ... ice411.htm ).

The number of services that you may not really need is incredible. My experience is that making some of the possible service adjustments not only free up memory and increase security but also speed up boot and reboot times. The fewer things that have to be loaded/unloaded, the less time the process takes.

On a T21 running XP Pro, I've cut boot/reboot times about 30 seconds by going from a 4,200 to a 5,400 rpm drive along with adjusting services per Black Viper's information/advice.

That's a prett yin depth page. Thanks for sharing it, I added it to my bookmarks for future reference.

Thanks for the Black Viper link. I used to have it, but then the site was taken down. Judging from the URL, I guess this is an archive from the former site.

The Black Viper site unfortunately has been shut down for a while, he had a great tutorial for running services on XP. Kellys Korner is a great site for fixes and information for XP also.

I have been using this site for about two years with no problems on any of the registry hacks she puts up.

http://www.kellys-korner.com/

http://www.theeldergeek.com/services_guide.htm

The eldergeek has something similar to what black viper had.