Boot time of WinXP Pro. on T43p

[BigCatAndy]

Hello.

Last time I noticed that my T43p boots rather slow under WinXP Pro - longer than 1 minute (from pressing the button till desktop appears). After several days of cleaning and tuning I could achieve approximately 1 minute. I still hold it for too long. What are your boot durations?

In WinXP I start nothing except Panda Antivirus, Active Connections and Power Manager - so, nothing extra-"heavy" in the sense of resources. And still in the area of 1 minute.

I would appreciate any feedback.

Cheers,
Andrey

[mgo]

Hello.

Last time I noticed that my T43p boots rather slow under WinXP Pro - longer than 1 minute (from pressing the button till desktop appears). After several days of cleaning and tuning I could achieve approximately 1 minute. I still hold it for too long. What are your boot durations?

In WinXP I start nothing except Panda Antivirus, Active Connections and Power Manager - so, nothing extra-"heavy" in the sense of resources. And still in the area of 1 minute.

I would appreciate any feedback.

Cheers,
Andrey

My personal belief is, all the patches & fixes done to XP over the years have slowed XP down significantly.

I am running XP SP2 with no other updates on a R50p with 2 gig of RAM and a 1.7 gig processor and it takes around 55 seconds from cold start to "ready to rumble". The hard drive footprint for the operating system and Office 2007 & a couple other large programs is under 6 gig.

Many XP installs can take up twice or three times that much real estate.

It is my understanding that the latest version of XP (SP3) has several million more lines of code in it.

[K0LO]

Try it without Access Connections. I found out that this utility doubled the boot time of my machine. Letting Windows manage the wired and wireless adapters has worked much better for me.

[Marin85]

Try it without Access Connections. I found out that this utility doubled the boot time of my machine. Letting Windows manage the wired and wireless adapters has worked much better for me.

Not always. For some mysterious reason AC can even speed up the bootup a bit in some cases. However, I really don´s know under what circumstances this is the case (but my theory is that it is always a bad idea to uninstall AC if having been installed).
@BigCatAndy: Also, if you feel enough of XP power user, you may want to try out nLite. Unlike vLite (for Vista), this utility really rocks

[K0LO]

...For some mysterious reason AC can even speed up the bootup a bit in some cases. However, I really don´s know under what circumstances this is the case (but my theory is that it is always a bad idea to uninstall AC if having been installed).

I find that hard to believe. AC seems to monopolize the CPU right after the desktop appears and on a machine with a slow HD like mine it made the machine useless for the first minute. Uninstalling AC did wonders for me. I guess YMMV.

[BigCatAndy]

Hello@all,

Try it without Access Connections. I found out that this utility doubled the boot time of my machine. Letting Windows manage the wired and wireless adapters has worked much better for me.

thanks for the feedback. I tried to disable ACTray at startup - nearly no effect. I remain in the area of 1 min. 10-15 sec.

Actually, my question was caused by my office laptop. It's DELL D630 (with 4 GB of RAM instead of 2) and Vista Business. It boots within seconds, really... I don't think that adding 2 extra GB of RAM would speed up WinXP dramatically. So, it means that this time depends more on the settings that on the hardware (folks, T43p with 2 GB of RAM is not that slow...)

But OK, if 1 minute is something average among the users here, I can tolerate it.

Cheers,
Andrey

[Marin85]

I find that hard to believe

So do I After upgrading my Toshiba 120 GB to Hitachi 7K200 I haven´t used AC a single time. Before that I had experienced both situations (and I could see the difference due to the anyway slow boot times my machine had). As already mentioned, I have no idea as to why or how (maybe just some dependency that got resolved with installing AC ).

Cheers

Marin

[RealBlackStuff]

My R52 (comparable to T43) takes 1 Min. 5 seconds.
But that is because I have a non-IBM approved hard disk in it, and that message shows up every boot.
Without that, I guess it would take no more than 35-40 seconds.
(I installed XP/SP3 from scratch, then installed IBM drivers/utils without Access Connection).

[BigCatAndy]

Hello@all,

My R52 (comparable to T43) takes 1 Min. 5 seconds.
But that is because I have a non-IBM approved hard disk in it, and that message shows up every boot.
Without that, I guess it would take no more than 35-40 seconds.
(I installed XP/SP3 from scratch, then installed IBM drivers/utils without Access Connection).

at WinXP I need something like this too. But under Linux I need even less than 30 seconds to boot. I suspect, that Panda slows down the booting - line any anti-virus/firewall software.

But, as I said above, if the 1 min. + some seconds is something what others have too, I'm quite satisfied.

Cheers,
A.

[davidspalding]

One minute from power-on to ready-to-rumble? Count your blessings. My system, with all the Thinkpad utilities, takes 2 minutes or more. I've tried to uninstall AC before, but couldn't figure out how to retain the FN+F5 hotkey to control the radios (Wifi + Bluetooth). BUT I can tell you to de-select the option to "use AC during Win Login" ... that will prevent the session from starting without AC making a connection. It made my boot times extraordinarily long.

I'm running XP Pro XP3 with most fixes (not Outlook Express). I'm almost ready to back up all my data, wipe my system to the shipped state, install all the latest utilities (manually), then install applications. Probably a winter vacation chore, and I think of more enjoyable things to do. I've done this once before with Win 2000 and it was a lot of effort ... and only sort of worth it.

[Stargate199]

I wouldn't worry about a 1 minute boot up. Most of the machines in my house take about 1 min 30 sec or more to start up. It those darn Windows Updates that usually slow down a machine because they go and fragment all of the windows files and M$ defrag program will not defrag any windows related files currently running. Use a different defrag program that can defrag before windows is fully loaded and that should help shave a few seconds off the boot time.

[K0LO]

I've come across articles that said one of the design goals for XP was that it should boot in 30 seconds, while the goal for Vista was 15 seconds. Note that this is for a clean install with minimal additional processes running at startup (like AV, firewall, antispyware, etc). I've come pretty close to this on desktop machines with fast 7200 rpm hard disks (30 sec for XP and 18 sec for Vista), but am hard-pressed to duplicate this on my X41T with its slow hard disk. The best I've achieved on the ThinkPad is 60 sec with XP SP2.

[BigCatAndy]

One minute from power-on to ready-to-rumble? Count your blessings.

Slowly I become more and more optimistic about my boot time.

Cheers,
Andrey

[Marin85]

Hm, has anyone tried Windows eXPerience?

[davidspalding]

That's a feature of Vista, isn't it?

[Marin85]

That's a feature of Vista, isn't it?

Yes and no It is a special "edition" of Windows XP, that is much more than nlited. It takes only 80 MB on a CD, installs about 200 MB on a HD and runs in less than 100 MB RAM. Of course, one could approach these parameters using nlite, but the eXPerience edition is a bit more tweaked than what is feasible with nlite, so the final result is quite impressive: while being pretty tiny and sustaining really good performance, it still remains usable, i.e. it has all typical features included that one may need. Also, it is not less stable than any normal XP and it offers even more security by having different vulnerable windows services and features removed. Unfortunately, it is not quite legal as this edition is preactivated , but this is also necessary to save space and to free up additional resources.