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Fastest XP boot-up?


jmbattle

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Good morning folks,

I am preparing a new nLite'd XP installation, and was wondering which configuration would produce the fastest boot-up:

- Keep Scheduled Tasks + Event Log to allow Prefectch ---> Bootvis

or

- Remove Scheduled Tasks + Event Log (removing Prefectch/Bootvis functionality)

With all other things being equal, has anyone benchmarked the two configurations side-by-side?

Cheers,

James

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No 'numbers' but removing scheduled tasks and setting as many services as possible to manual/disabled does the trick for me. Actually removing services/files doesn't do a thing for startup times.

Laving everything in lets you adjust things as needed. The idea of boot profiles helps a lot here too. A quick booting minimal profile for when you need it and othe rprofiles of various functionalities for other things.

If you really want a fast startup, invest in hardware that works quickly on startup. You need a mobo with a bios and disk controller that gets to work quickly instead of pausing ever second or three. At a minimum this means an EFI 1.10 (UEFI draft) BIOS.

And don't forget a fast/fat hard drive that (at least on paper) can actually saturate the sata channels.

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Thank you for the prompt response newsposter.

In previous years I have always removed all of the services that I do not require - including EventLog (I recall that nuhi eventually found a way to prevent the long boot delay that would occur if this was removed).

However, I intend to prepare an XP installation for a Dell Mini 9 netbook (dual booting with Leopard) which uses an SSD. I know that prefetch can improve the boot performance of traditional HD systems, and was therefore wondering if the same would also be true for SSD drives.

I think I may prepare a test using VirtualBox to compare the boot performance. I know that this is not a 'real world' test, however it should provide a close-enough environment.

It's interesting that you note the importance of a BIOS that supports fast EFI booting. Unfortunately the Dell bios displays a logo for a few seconds at power-on, compared to other netbooks (Asus for example) that start booting almost instantly.

Thanks again!

Cheers,

James

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Well, I ran nLite on a WinXP SP3 distribution, with the following configuration:

- All components removed.

- All components removed, prefetch compatibility selected.

After installation on two separate VirtualBox virtual machines, I installed the guest additions, disabled the pagefile, and turned off the additional services (cryptographic services etc.). On the prefetch compatible setup I ran bootvis and selected the optimise system option. Then shutdown both installations.

Finally, I measured the time taken from clicking VirtualBox's 'Start' gadget (includes BIOS POST etc.) until the desktop appeared. Both systems booted in 9 seconds, however the resource usage was slightly higher in the prefect compatible system, due to the EventLog service.

It would therefore appear that there is little to be gained by retaining prefetch compatibility when preparing an ultra-lite XP installation.

Cheers,

James

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It's my understanding that for pre-fetch to do any real good, the files need to be kept on a device (small SSD, UDMA CF card on an PCI adapter, etc) that is 'faster' than the main HDD things would normally load from.

This is the theory behind Intels TurboBoost anyway. Pre-fetch on XP is 'almost' the same as Vista TurboBoost but they both depend on the user spending the $$ necessary for a really fast secondary storage device.

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