How To Speed Up Computer Bootup And Shutdown Time

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It is exasperating to wait for ages for your PC to bootup to start work and shut down when you have finished your work.

In the next few minutes, you’ll discover some tweaks you can use to immediately increase your PC bootup and shut-down time:

1. Disable those devices in your BIOS that you’re  not using. Each time you turn on your computer, it spends a lot of time initializing each of the devices present in the system.

2. Use ‘Bootvis’, a utility from Microsoft that can shave off a small amount of bootup time. This software examines the timing and order of various bootup processes and rearranges them in such a way that the computer can read them faster.

This software has already been built into Windows XP.  You can download from www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=664 if you want to try it out.

3. Remove unwanted background tasks of third parties tools as they tends to reduce the speed. Internet Explorer browser extensions and tool-bars are good examples of such third party tasks.

4. Disconnect network drives if you’re not using them as they can significantly slow down your computer.

5. There is plenty of wrong advice going around that deleting the contents in the Pre-fetch Folder of Windows XP can increase speed. Actually, this folder is made of PF files and is necessary as it can actually speed up the load time.  Ignore advice to change the default value of ‘3’ of your Registry Pre-fetch flag to ‘2’ to optimize the loading time of system files. This will actually slow down application load times and will not do anything significant for your boot up time.

6. Defragmenting Windows partition is one way to help reduce bootup time. This will minimize the write/read activity of the hard drive. The pre-fetch folder helps it improve further as the Layout.ini file that has a set of files and folders loaded by Windows and the applications you use get organized in the order they are loaded.

7. Enable Windows XP Task Scheduler, it helps the Disk Defragmenter to run on a regular basis. It will relocate the listed files and folders with the help of information that is available in the layout.ini file, to a contiguous part of the hard disk.

8. While there is not much of a problem with Windows 98 while shutting down, it is quite exasperating with Windows XP as it takes a long time to power down. Some people get so frustrated with the shut down time in a Windows XP that they just switch off the power button. However, there is an inherent risk of losing data if one does this.

One way to solve this problem is using Regedit from Microsoft.

Use the Run command to launch Regedit.

- Type in ‘Regedit’. There are two parameters called HungAppTimeout, with a default setting of 20,000 milliseconds and WaitToKillAppTimeout with a default setting of 5,000 milliseconds.
- These parameters increase the shut down time.
- Save your files as frequently as you can, manually close down all applications and then attempt shutting down of Windows, you can change the two parameters to 1,000 milliseconds delay.

9. If you don’t want any ‘End Task’ message to appear, change AutoEndTasks parameter to the default value of ‘1’ from ‘0’ in the same Registry.

These small moves can considerable reduce your bootup and shut down times. Try it and let me know if it helps improve your computer experience.