Speed up boot with buried features in msconfig

Injector · 05-25-2009, 05:51 PM

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="Micro soft 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.

jpinkerton · 05-25-2009, 08:38 PM

Nice guide w/ pics! Thanks!

WuNgUn · 05-26-2009, 09:34 AM

Basevideo switch is always a good one to use, especially if your processing your audio. You don't want to choke the PCI bus with useless, accelerated video data...
CF, for example, works perfectly fine with no hardware acceleration.

Virac · 05-26-2009, 02:58 PM

The numproc is somthing ive used for a while but i dont know if it really does too much, I just use it in hopes that it may save a few clocks. My boot is usually restricted by my IO (hard drives).

I use XP, but I just checked it on a Win7 install and it seems to increase the boot speed then again it was my IT guy checking it on his personal laptop at work so we wernt running bootvis. It would seem that Vista/7 seem to be more multithreaded/core optimized what puzzles me as why it would only use 1 without this change.

Ill see if i can get our IT guy here to do this to an oct-core XP machine to see if it makes a difference.

HiJackZX1 · 05-26-2009, 03:09 PM

Also another thing that will help with boot is how much stuff is on your desktop. The more you have the longer it takes to load. Another way is to right click over My Computer, go to properties. Now hit the advanced tab and hit performance. Under the Visual Effects Tab, choose Adjust for best performance. That step is more for general use, but should help. Windows also has like a default time before it fully boots, I think its set at 30 seconds by default. You have to change it to 3 (anything like 2 or 1 is not recommended, must be 3 and up). Now this is easy to do, just follow the step from Injector and use the msconfig, click on the BOOT.INI tab, then where it says Timeout: 30 seconds, on the right, change it to 3 and hit apply.

Virac · 05-26-2009, 08:15 PM

Ok good news I ran a bunch of tests on this and got consistant results. gotta love when results converge.

Without any changes to boot.ini boots in 35secs +- 1.5 secs ( 5 boots )
With /numproc=2 /maxmem=3048 and timeout=3secs boots in 20secs +- 1sec ( 7 boots )

HiJackZX1 · 05-26-2009, 08:52 PM

Quote: Originally Posted by Virac

Ok good news I ran a bunch of tests on this and got consistant results. gotta love when results converge.

Without any changes to boot.ini boots in 35secs +- 1.5 secs ( 5 boots )
With /numproc=2 /maxmem=3048 and timeout=3secs boots in 20secs +- 1sec ( 7 boots )

HAHAHAHA, I cant wait till I get my system going 100%, then I can get these mods done to the OS.

WuNgUn · 05-27-2009, 09:17 AM

Too bad this doesn't help with resuming the PC at all!! Or does it???
More testing!!!!

Injector · 05-27-2009, 01:34 PM

Quote: Originally Posted by WuNgUn

Too bad this doesn't help with resuming the PC at all!! Or does it???
More testing!!!!

good question i haven't tested resume times. i'll give it a try and let you know.

WuNgUn · 05-27-2009, 02:45 PM

Thanks Injector...
I enabled 2 cores anyway, but haven't timed a resume before/after.

HiJackZX1 · 05-27-2009, 03:26 PM

Quote: Originally Posted by WuNgUn

Thanks Injector...
I enabled 2 cores anyway, but haven't timed a resume before/after.

You mean both cores on a dual core setup arent automatically on?

WuNgUn · 05-27-2009, 03:37 PM

Nope...I had to manually configure it. And on my quad core desktop, same thing...both Vista and W7.

HiJackZX1 · 05-27-2009, 03:44 PM

Quote: Originally Posted by WuNgUn

Nope...I had to manually configure it. And on my quad core desktop, same thing...both Vista and W7.

OH wow. I am using XP, but I have a AMD Turion X2. I have to check on that when I get my screen back from Lilliput.

csfile · 05-27-2009, 06:05 PM

It surprised me too that it was not automatically using as many procs as possible. I'll have to see if it actually improved my boot times. Looks very promising from the results posted here.

Rescuer · 06-08-2009, 06:47 PM

thanks for the info

(kinda hard to accept it though from a person with so many desktop icons

)

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