Rule 1: The system must be fully installed and operational as you use it everyday. No minimalist setting.

Rule 2: Chronometer the time (with your cell phone for example) from the time you pressed the button on the case and the tme your desktop is ready without any hourglass left on the mouse pointer.

Rule 3: Chronometer the time since you clicked on "OK" on the shut down dialog and the fan stops spinning.

Rule4: You have the right to close all programs before shutting down and not to launch any program at startup, but don't disable anything for the test which is not an application.

Rule 5: You have the right to cmment and mention unconventional items that you run on start up or that were running when shuting down.

Ready?



Here are my results:

Booting: 54 seconds (desktop appeared with all the icons and the taskbar after 35 seconds but the hourglass last 20 sec)
Turning off: 4.5 second every window closed, 9.5 seconds with internet still connected and Maxthon browser open.

This post has been edited by Fredledingue: Jul 18 2008, 02:27 PM

My Pentium-MMX oc'ed to 292MHz booted in 30sec and shut down in 4sec, however i needed that HDD in it for something else and the backup didn't get saved properly, else i would've posted proof.

That was on a standard 98SE install, before i ever knew of this forum. Just a few tweaks in MSDOS.SYS, nothing special. However that system booted really fast, i installed XP on it as a joke and it was usable after 40 seconds since hitting the power button...

PS. You got a PM on a matter i don't know if i can post on the forum.

This post has been edited by Th3_uN1Qu3: Jul 14 2008, 07:38 PM

I got 57 seconds boot up. I have a pentium 3 933mhz with 256mb ram so win 98 runs great. This is with auto patcher december 2007 and about 15gb of stuff on the hard drive however I make sure only the things I want start on boot up.

My Compaq Armada 7730MT with P166MMX and 48MB, running W95OSR2 boots in 53 seconds (from which 36 seconds is used by the BIOS, maybe because the cmos battery has died long ago). Shutdown in 4 seconds.

hmm,
I see that both of you do better than me!

win98se updated with the 'Win98 Autopatcher', 512mb ram, 1ghz pentium3 with huge heatsink & fan, broadband and cable modem.

Shutdown after a couple of hours surfing (hotmail, youtube, chatzy, outlook webmail), installing two programmes, writing docs, playing online games: 9 seconds, sometimes 20 seconds.

Startup running 'AVGfree edition' bootup virus check and 'win98 disk cleanup', 'spybot search and destroy', 'Netveda free firewall': 3 minutes 15 secs [ouch!]

This post has been edited by bikerbrom: Jul 18 2008, 04:51 PM

And I retested my shut down time: 4.5 seconds when no window is open and no program left running and no internet connection. Instead of 9.5 seconds previousely posted.

So, we are already 3 guys and gals who shut down their computer in less than 5 secs. Not bad! 8)

My FE box shuts down in 6 seconds.

Regarding the bootup, my FE box has additional items that add quite a bit to the boot time. There's the bootloader, which has a 3 second delay to the default selection. There's a batch file that's called from autoexec.bat. which adds over a full minute to the boot time. It's a multi-profile PC, so there's the password prompt, which the "escape" key won't bypass. My boot cycle includes 6 "run once" processes, loaded from several locations. A standard bootup ends with 16 running processes.

It takes 30 seconds to leave the BIOS since I switched the 3rd drive. Used to take about 5 seconds. Not sure why this drive takes so long. It takes another 5 seconds at the bootloader until 98 starts booting. From there, it's about 95 seconds to the profile password prompt, most of which is used by the batch file. After entering the password, it's another 40 seconds until hard drive activity ceases. The total is 3:05 with the batch file, 1:55 without it. When I account for time used by the BIOS and for entering passwords, windows itself and the autostart processes takes just over a minute. With most of the "Run Once" entries removed, it's under 45 seconds.

The additional 70 seconds of startup time from running the batch file is a small price to pay for booting with a clean, compacted, and optimized registry, clean copies of the core system files, and protected copies of the other autostart locations.
Rick

Hi all,

Here are the timmings for my main system:
Startup:

-78secs (17s to load the GeForce Fx BIOS, 10s to detect all hardware (up to the "Starting Windows 98" message), and about 51s to load Win98 to desktop with no HDD activity)

No record breaker here though. Someone just got <35s(!) =X

Shutdown:
-2.7s (Mostly, but provided that I did not do anything that is very stressful pior to shutdown, such as the moving of many very big files.
-about 5-10s (Maybe even 20s, but rarely) if I did do something very stressful.

Main programs that load at startup:
AVG 7.5
RAMDef 2.7XT
Ensoniq Mixer
Nvidia software
and windows services (hotfixes, registry scanning, etc)

System specs:

CPU: PIII 1GHZ
MOBO: Gigabyte GA-6OXM7E, 512MB RAM
OS: Windows 98SE (Win95 shell), with IE6 Dis-Integrated, Multi-boot with MS-DOS 6.22
HDD: Seagate 80GB
CD-ROM: Sony 8x CD-ROM
GPU: GeForce Fx 5200
HDD Interface: ATA-100

This post has been edited by sp193: Aug 14 2008, 10:14 AM

My system takes more than a minute to start. Much more then a minute. I takes 20s just to load all BIOS extensions, and then there's the boot manager with a timout, and then there is a CHOICE.COM line in AUTOEXEC.BAT with a timeout and then there's a registry file to import, and then there are lots of drivers to load...
Shutdown takes 8-10s because I set CacheWriteDelay=5000 to improve performance.

This post has been edited by Marius '95: Jul 23 2008, 08:00 AM

No record here. It takes 58 seconds to boot (BIOS takes 10 seconds, SMART check activated) and 15 to shutdown the computer (this is linked to the buggy nvidia drivers). It's a three years old win98SE with lots of devices plugged and all TSR enabled.

Time to boot 57s. Goes through Promise controller bios (which adds about 5-7s) and then boot manager.

Time to shutdown 12s (with internet connected). Delay caused by ZA firewall which adds about 4-5 secs to process

This post has been edited by risk_reversal: Jul 25 2008, 11:05 AM

Time to boot: 35s.Dual boot , Firefox preloader 98se2m/xp 800Mhz 512Mb
Time to shout down:7s active internet windows.

Would be nice to compile a list of everyone's times for reference.

System: Pentium II 233 Mhz with 160 MB of RAM running Windows 95 OSR 2.5
Boot time: 35 seconds (of which exactly 20 seconds are occupied by the BIOS)
Shutdown time: milliseconds shy of 3 seconds

For those of you wondering what happened with my boot time of 29 seconds, previously I started counting when my BIOS made its beep.

This post has been edited by BenoitRen: Aug 12 2008, 07:02 PM

M$ did it for Vista. I seriousely doubts their results reflect boot time "until no HDD activity" and fully available OS.
IMO it must shows when the desktop is there and the mouse ready to move. Anf they probably don't coun't the time that a user takes to click his user logon logo.
Still Vista boots faster than XP which takes an eternity to boot up.
http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/

*Clicks OK, Sticks Pen In Fan*
...1sec

Seriously though:
Boot - ~1.2min (RAID boot screens takes forever to scan for drives...)
Shutdown (minus pen in fan) - ~5sec

WinXP on my laptop and secondary PC boot fast.

This is my 98SE

Start Time: 02:04.47 total 01:01.54 to logon screen
Have Kerio Personal Firewall and Avast is configured to do memory test at startup.

Shutdown Time: 00:10.15

Computer:
Gateway Essential 667 (yr 2000)
Operating System Microsoft Windows 98 SE
OS Service Pack None
Internet Explorer 6.0.2800.1106 (IE 6.0 SP1)
DirectX 4.09.00.0904 (DirectX 9.0)

Motherboard:
CPU Type Intel Pentium IIIE, 667 MHz
Motherboard Name Intel Willow Springs 2 WL810E (4 PCI, 2 DIMM, Audio, Video)
Motherboard Chipset Intel Whitney i810E
System Memory 509 MB
BIOS Type AMI (10/03/00)

Storage:
Floppy Drive GENERIC NEC FLOPPY DISK
Disk Drive GENERIC IDE DISK TYPE47 (15.3 GB)
Optical Drive MITSUMI CD-ROM FX4831T!A
Optical Drive TSSTcorp CDDVDW SH-S202G

Clean install April, 2008. Used soporfic's Autopatcher for 98SE. Everything except power supply, monitor, dvd, keyboard and mouse is original. Kb and mouse borrowed from 2001 Gateway running ME (my wife prefers them). Power supply and dvd added April


Running processes after startup. A lot and some I don't need, but the machine works very well.

ASHMAISV c:\program files\alwil software\avast4\ashmaisv.exe 14412 KB
ASHSERV c:\program files\alwil software\avast4\ashserv.exe 9084 KB
ASHWEBSV c:\program files\alwil software\avast4\ashwebsv.exe 8928 KB
BAUSB c:\program files\boston acoustics\boston usb audio system\bausb.exe 4748 KB
BOSTON c:\program files\boston acoustics\boston usb audio system\boston.exe 13212 KB
DDHELP c:\windows\system\ddhelp.exe 5640 KB
EXPLORER c:\windows\explorer.exe 15340 KB
GWHOTKEY c:\windows\gwhotkey.exe 3584 KB
HIDSERV c:\windows\system\hidserv.exe 4756 KB
HKCMD c:\windows\system\hkcmd.exe 6156 KB
HPQTRA08 c:\program files\hp\digital imaging\bin\hpqtra08.exe 9396 KB
HPWUSCHD2 c:\program files\hp\hp software update\hpwuschd2.exe 3488 KB
IGFXTRAY c:\windows\system\igfxtray.exe 6112 KB
KB891711 c:\windows\system\kb891711\kb891711.exe 3440 KB
KERNEL32 c:\windows\system\kernel32.dll 816 KB
LOADQM c:\windows\loadqm.exe 6880 KB