Skip to Content
Windows XP Hacks
book

Windows XP Hacks

by Preston Gralla
August 2003
Beginner
416 pages
12h 47m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Windows XP Hacks

Speed Up Boot and Shutdown Times

Shorten the time it takes for your desktop to appear when you turn on your PC, and make XP shut down faster as well.

No matter how fast your PC boots, it’s not fast enough. Here’s a hack to help you get to your desktop more quickly after startup, and to let you walk away faster after shutdown.

The quickest way to speed up boot times is to use the free Microsoft utility BootVis.exe. Although it’s intended primarily for developers, anyone can use it to analyze their boot times and see where there are slowdowns. More important, the tool will also automatically make system changes to speed up your boot time, so you don’t need to go into a lengthy analysis of where your slowdowns are and how to solve them.

Depending on your system and how it’s set up, you may see only a moderately faster startup time, or you may speed up boot time dramatically. I’ve seen reports of improvements ranging from a little over 3 seconds to more than 35 seconds. The improvements I found on my systems were moderate—7 seconds faster on one, and 10 seconds faster on another. Think of all the things you could accomplish with another 10 seconds in the day!

The BootVis utility traces boot time metrics and then displays the results in a variety of graphs showing total boot time, CPU usage, disk I/O, driver delays, and disk utilization. Download it from http://www.microsoft.com/hwdev/platform/performance/fastboot/BootVis.asp and extract it into its own folder. Go to the folder and double-click ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

Windows XP Hacks, 2nd Edition

Windows XP Hacks, 2nd Edition

Preston Gralla

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596005113