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.

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.

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!]

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

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.

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

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.