XP slow to boot

Is there anything I can do to speed up boot times? I've managed to get it down to 1 min by using the hibernate function, but I've heard of boot times of 20 sec. or less. I've tried bootvis.exe but it didn't make any difference.

 

leftfield: Your one-minute boot-up time is about the same as mine. Are you by any chance using ZoneAlarm? My experience with it, and also a few other members of this BBS, is that the icons on your desktop will appear fairly quickly but then there's a lengthy period of dead silence, finally followed by some HDD "rattling" inside your computer, and then everything else quickly gets done and boot-up is complete. I don't know what ZA is doing during all that time, but it could be your culprit and you probably just have to let it do its thing.

Does that pattern sound familiar? Get back to us with your findings, and it would help if you gave us a bit more information about your system. Good luck.

 

Oh.. I didn't find the analysis page in bootvis. Well, prefetching takes up a lot of the minute, and services take up about 25 sec. Strangely I tried removing services I didn't need from XP but this doesn't seem to make any difference. I tend to use the computer at various times during the day, and it just gets a bit irritating after a while, waiting to boot. It's a P2, but I don't know whether getting a P4 would cure it? Thanks for the help, anyway.

 

If it's a P2 then the maximum speed you have is a 450 (or less). You won't get lightning speed with XP and a 450. But it's useable. Make sure you have at least 256Mb RAM. Keep the system defragged on a regular basis and use a couple of registry cleaners as well. A P4 will dramatically speed up boot-time and general operation over a P2.