[martbhell]

Hey, we got an assignment for tomorrow at school; start a Windows XP machine as fast as possible, with a notepad document in the autostart. With almost no hardware changes, (overclocking is counted as sw), maybe add a little more memory.

They'll be using a timer, and the count is from when we/they press the On button.

System is: Windows XP, AMD 1600 (nto sure if it's a duron or not), 256MB RAM, could get 512 or something, not very sure about what type), a Maxtor 30GB hd i think we're using. A ATI 128 grapic card. nic, and a cdrom. keyboard, mouse and monitor. (we dont have to use em all, but as i said, no bigger changes on the hw).

So far we got a couple things to do.

Cleaninstall of Windows XP.
TweakUI, any advice on that one?
Disabling everything that's 'disablable' in BIOS
Also, in device manager, such as USB and COM ports.
Loading in Safe Mode
Moving the swap as close to the 'begining' of the HD as possible.
Maybe teh hybernating mode will be allowed, not sure tho, think it's a clean start.
OC the memory and CPU, PCI slots too. Not sure how to OC PCI and memory, any advices there?
The motherboard counts the RAM when it boots up, are there usually a BIOS setting to disable this? If not, there's always the ESC i guess
Monitor settings, are there any way to enable monochrome colors?

Then to inside windows, go to msconfig and disable everything that's not useful, since we're not gonna use any networking, it should be pretty little left there. Make all visualisation options to as little as possible. (classic, no welcome menu), autologin( using that neat thing that i just read before on the board).

1. Edit boot.ini
2. Add " /noguiboot" right after "/fastdetect".
(or check the /noguiboot switch in msconfig on the boot.ini tab)
Upon restarting, the splash screen will be gone. It can be re-enabled by removing the new switch.

Create a New Folder by right clicking on desktop. New>Folder.
Open "Fonts" in Control Panel. Switch to Classic View to find them easier.
Highlight a group of fonts younever use and move them to the other folder. Repeat if you have tons of fonts.
Put the folder into My Documents for easy access.
Reboot and see if it starts any faster for you. If not, just copy the fonts back to the original font folder.

Clear temporary internet files and History.


Any nice registry settings that could come usefull?
NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate

LargeSystemCache - http://www.winguides.com/registry/display.php/931/
one 1 assume.

IoPageLockLimit - http://www.winguides.com/registry/display.php/55/ - this one should be set pretty high in this case huh? Found a site saying this should be used: 256M: 10000; 512M or more: 40000. Value is in bytes.

DisablePagingExecutive - http://www.winguides.com/registry/display.php/399/ - this one looks very nice, gotta get pretty much ram though.. said on a site only to 1 if above 128MB.

Should we use the application bootvis?

Any help on this matter is highly appriciated =) Only got a few hours left til it's time to do this, just found out today.

// mart

[jmmijo]

I think you may find it loading slower into SAFE mode vs. normal

I'd do some testing on this one just to see.

You should be able to disable most device drivers then, things like the COM ports, LPT, USB, but leave the the PS/2 port enabled, if available for the mouse.

Don't use any of the extra features that slows the machine down like Hybernation or System Recovery and disable most of the services, especially if this is a stand-alone machine, non-networked that is

Overclocking may not help a lot however on this kind of thing, you're just getting timed on the actual startup speed ti appears.

Here's another guide to look at:

http://www.tweakxp.com/

[mrk22]

Quote:

Hey, we got an assignment for tomorrow at school; start a Windows XP machine as fast as possible, with a notepad document in the autostart. With almost no hardware changes, (overclocking is counted as sw), maybe add a little more memory.

They'll be using a timer, and the count is from when we/they press the On button.

1. Set standby mode to S3 in BIOS.

2. Write a program that launches the notepad file whenever it detects coming out of standby.

3. Set the machine to standby just before the test is done.

It should start in 5-15 seconds. This is, of course, probably all illegal in the contest.

[martbhell]

Yeah, I think so too, and we can't program.. at all

[Tomay]

You only need 6 services to run windowsxp. (no audio, no themes...)

Check out http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm to see which.

Check out prefetch clean and control http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=2495

[martbhell]

Quote:

You only need 6 services to run windowsxp. (no audio, no themes...)

Check out http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm to see which.

Check out prefetch clean and control http://www.majorgeek...ad.php?det=2495

we tried to select diagnostic setup in msconfig, that actually made the computer startup a lot slower (at approx. a minute), but at normal setup. But we OCed it to 2.4GHz, added a 256MB stick, set the memories to Cas 2, then we disabled pretty much everything in BIOS, Device Manager. We also didnt disable many (if any at all, services), didnt try to boot it to safemode either, maybe because we didnt know of a way to set it to at default boot into safemode. Also, the NIC in the computer had something in it's PROM (or whatever it's called) that it should try and boot from the network, that would probably be disabled threw the NIC's BIOS, but we pressed spacebar really fast instead =) . A reinstall of XP we also did (where we removed all fonts or what it was in the installationsetup, and we also moved all the fonts that didnt have an "a" icon in the fonts dir.

=) Maybe somebody will have some use of this sometime.

p.s. we booted xp and file in notepad in 25.5 seconds =) beating the last years record with approx 2 seconds

[adamvjackson]

Also, check out BootVis, from Microsoft.

[martbhell]

Yeah, heard about that one too, saw on Microsoft.com that it did not improve boot performance.. in fact it could do the otherwise. We made it all from a clean xp installation, perhaps it's not needed then?

[adamvjackson]

I hadn't heard that, to be honest. I'm still using Windows 2000 Professional here, and no emminent plans to upgrade to XP.



I had heard that BootVis could decrease boot time, but that was a long time ago, shortly after the XP launch. I think the next "big step" with faster booting computers will have to require preloading of an OS kernel in SRAM, although these are just ideas that I toss around.

Congrats on your successful project, it seems as though you did a good job researching your options.

As a sidenote, I personally hate rebooting. On my home machine, it is not at all uncommon to have uptimes of around two weeks between reboots.

[martbhell]

rebooting is evil .) but that's for that other OS... .)

[Malakai1911]

Use XPLite to remove virtually everything from windows.

Time the results. ^_-

And give bootvis a try. You never know how well it works till you try :-P

[daniel_iversen]

Hi there..

here is a guide on how to make Windows 2000 run fast on old computers with only 32MB RAM.... this guide/notes also works for Windows XP and will tell you what to disable to get a high-performance system..

www.nexle.dk/daniel/win2000-32mb

The only thing you might want to add from this guide is the caching settings as described elsewhere in this thread.

Good luck!