What is the best way to a "fast boot" up, or quick start / shutdown for windows xp ?

Question

I go in & out of "location work" every day, and have to start / shutdown windows....it takes longer & longer to boot-up......The hardrive on the laptop has very little that is stored on it, so it's not lacking storage....ram is about 512...any help appreciated.....thanks

Answer 1

There are any number of optimizations you can perform, first, take care of some registry edits and turn off unnecessary services (this is NOT msconfig) read the guide here, http://www.connectedinternet.co.uk/2005/12/5/652 and part 2 here, http://www.connectedinternet.co.uk/2006/1/12/706

Then you can disable any unnecessary startup items in msconfig (start > Run type msconfig, enter), look them up on a search engine to see if they are relevant, usually a process library will be the first result.

Then run Bootvis to optimize your boot time, http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=664

Something that is not mentioned in anything so far is to disable GUI boot (the Windows XP logo and progress bar will not appear when you boot) to disable that go to msconfig and click the BOOT.INI tab and select the NOGUIBOOT option.

Now get yourself TuneXP (run it according to the very useful users guide), http://www.driverheaven.net/dforce/default.php

Get some cleaning utilities like CCleaner, http://www.ccleaner.com/ and CleanUp!, http://www.stevengould.org/software/cleanup/ and run them both.

Then defrag your hard drive either with the built-in utility or Diskeeper Lite (free version), http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=1207

That's all I can think of for the moment.

And yes, standby or hibernate when you can which is the easiest solution. But hey, at least you'll get it booting and shutting down faster than ever.

Answer 2

If you have a good battery, I would use hibernation mode. But if you don't have one, find a start up advisor program. You may have software you don't want starting up doing exactly that.

Good news- Microsoft Vista has a new sleep mode that uses even less power and would be feasible in any occasion.

Answer 3

What's the use...? Just let it do its thang, it's not like you have to be there to guide it through the shutdown process.. Don't unplug it, an instantaneous power failure can result in disk errors, program errors, OS errors, etc. NEVER unplug.

Answer 4

Don't shut it down. In your power settings in the control panel. You can set the laptop to hibernate when you close the lid. It comes back much faster from hibernate then a cold boot. I hibernate mine all the time and it does not drain the battery at all, its like being turned off.

Answer 5

To fast shutdown, just yank the power cable off the wall power outlet.