Thread: Speed up boot with buried features in msconfig

I happened to stumble upon this a little while ago.



First click on start (I’m using XP with a Vista theme, on some Vista machines you might have to enable the run box before, or just hit the windows key and R



Then click on Run



This dialog should appear, now type msconfig and hit OK



After this dialog appears click on the boot.ini tab



Now you should have various options, the first thing that you need to do is
select the windows boot line, most of the times it will be something like
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional"
(The only reason why I have more than one is because I have a recovery console and Linux), once you selected the correct line you can now enable some advanced options:

/safeboot: is self explanatory.
/noguiboot: removes the windows xp logo during boot with just a blank screen. (useful if you don’t want to change the logo but don’t want the XP logo either)
/bootlog: causes windows to write a log of the boot to the file %SystemRoot%\Ntbtlog.txt (useful for diagnosing boot issues)
/basevideo: causes windows to use the standard VGA display driver for GUI-mode operations. (useful if you currupt your video driver)
And my favorite
/sos: instead of displaying the windows logo it displays what is being loaded and executed (useful when you don’t know why your boot process is taking so long)

When you’re done with your options click on the “Advanced Options tab”
You should now see this dialog, the options we’re looking for are :



/maxmem: tell windows how much memory to use during boot
//numproc: in multicore system you can specify how many processors or cores windows can use for boot up.

After setting numproc to 2 my boot time reduced from 1:52:45 to 1:28:36 and setting the maxmem to all the memory my pc has gave me an extra 2 seconds

keep in mind this is my test pc not my carpc that why i have such high boot times.

also if you know what you're doing you can open boot.ini in notepad and add the switches in manually, but be careful if you do it wrong the system won't boot.


Hope this helps some of you.