Possible to make Win7 Boot faster on i7 rig?

[p0rtal]

Well, I did a little researching last night to find out how to make my OS boot faster, right now its a solid 40 seconds from pressing the on button to usable desktop. My rig is an I7 960, x58 gaming series with 12 gb of ram. Followed a few guides on youtube that didn't make much of a difference that included setting the number of cores to 4 and max memory on the msconfig window. This rig came with a 64gb solid state which had the OS on it, boot up was about a 1/3 faster and shut down took less than 5 seconds compared to now at about 12. I opted to sell it due to its immensely small size and stuck with the 1tb hdd which I then loaded Win7 on myself.

Any other tweaks you can recommend to get this rig to boot up quickly and shut down faster? There are tons of apps in the services start up that I really don't know what to do with and dont want to toggle them off, Startup only has 5 required things that need to be active when booting up. Outside of that, not sure what else I can do or if this is the limits of what Win7 + my rigs specs can achieve. 40 second boot up seems slow on my 1tb HDD.

 

[neon neophyte]

i would have suggested keeping that ssd even if small, and installing programs to the 1tb drive.

lil late now though

 

[p0rtal]

I tried that but the SSD was still losing space when I would install something into the HDD. I made a few topics about it here with no success. Tried reinstalling the OS and formatting both hdds when I had them. I decided to sell it due to being unable to stop the SSD from filling up when something was installed to the HDD, things like Steam games. A fraction of my library installed to the HDD was enough to fill the SSD completely. Its shared, you cant stop it apparently.

Anywho, any help on this boot issue is appreciated

 

[DelroyMonjo]

40 seconds isn't that bad. You got spoiled by the SSD.

 

[JackNaylorPE]

If using MSconfig give ya the bejeebees, try Mike Lin's Start Up Control Panel

http://mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml

Here's measured boot up times on 2600k build

Seagate Barracude XT (2 TB) - 21.2 seconds
Vertex 3 Max IOPS SSD - 15.6 seconds
Seagate Momentus Hybrid - 16.4 seconds

 

[photonboy]

The CPU has little to do with boot times. It's actually quite simple:

1) use HIBERNATION, and

2) get an SSD

Hibernation mode saves your current state so coming out of hibernation is FASTER than a cold boot. It's saved to your main drive then copied BACK to your System RAM when you turn ON your computer after hibernating it.

*I ran out of space on my 60GB drive too; 60GB is simply not enough after System Restore backups, MS updates etc. I ended up getting an identical one and going with RAID0. You don't get TRIM but that's not a big deal. Normally I recommend a single 120GB SSD.

Another option:
You might consider using your SSD for your PAGEFILE and HIBERFIL. Google that.

 

[Dark Lord of Tech]

http://www.malwarebytes.org/products/startuplite

Nice little startup app from the malwarebytes folks ^

 

[p0rtal]

I just tried that malwarebytes program and it says there is nothing to toggle on or off, same goes for the other program, nothing really to toggle on or off that isnt Microsoft branded, pretty much just google update, the AMD GPU events update and something from Adobe. Toggled them all off and shaved a few seconds off shutdown but bootup remains the same

They do not make any Solid State Hard Drives large enough to handle sharing the load from Steam games. If you download a Steam bought game to your 2ndary HDD, it will also stick a significant % of that game to your primary SDD. Even a 250gb SDD isn't big enough to house my collection. There is nothing I can do to stop this, its how windows and steam are made and can't be changed. If you have two drivers, it shares between them. A 500GB might help but it will be used up in the next 2-3 years, then I will be right back to where I was recently with a filled up primary but this time I'll have to redownload 500+ GB worth of media.

Lol, computers >.>

 

[Dark Lord of Tech]

Speed Up the Windows 7 Bootup Time

Press [Win] + R or take the RUN option from the start menu.
Now type msconfig in there and press Enter Key to open up the System Configuration Window. Click on the Boot tab in there.
You will see a box called Time out. This is the time (in sec) which the system waits for the user to select the operating system to boot to.
You can safely set the value to 0.
Tick the "No GUI Boot" option too [turns off the Windows 7 logo at boot-up].
Click Apply and then on OK.

 

[Dark Lord of Tech]

http://helpspot.business.uconn.edu/index.php?pg=kb.page&id=200

This might help in some cases ^

 

[p0rtal]

cannot set the value below 3 seconds in the timeout box , I also mentioned I already did the cpu core number and max ram method in the first post here

 

[jimpz]

If your motheboard uses a 'bios', that will be a almost standard 30 seconds untill your system gets to/starts to load windows. Hence 40 seconds is pretty good.
To be faster, you need a mother board that uses 'UEFI', this is almost instataneous, andallows under 30 second boots.

JimPz

 

[p0rtal]

Its a bios, my timeline is the following from pressing the power button

X58 motherboard logo screen > Black "something" adapter and bios screen > CD rom boot priority screen > windows logo > desktop. I made sure to get a very nice hitachi HDD that had good speed and boot reviews. Naturally, I want everything to be much faster than my expensive rig can dish out

 

[Cons29]

i use an 80gb intel ssd, its not top of the line but boot time is around 18sec.

40 is nice, no biggie, just do something else while waiting, prepare coffee or get a beer

 

[memadmax]

The thing that consumes the most time for windows startup back in the old days(besides the loading of the OS itself) is network chores(finding a dhcp server, getting an IP, etc etc).... Not much you can do about that.
Try disabling your network card(in bios, not windows) and see if you get a difference.

 

[memadmax]

As others have said: hibernate, which I do constantly.... I haven't gave a hoot about windows startup times in years.

 

[p0rtal]

Beer sounds nice right about now. But I use a usb wired adapter, ill test that out now and see if it helps.

 

[memadmax]

Heh, same deal.
It's stopping windows from communicating on a network is what counts.

 

[p0rtal]

didnt make any difference, i guess i have to live with it haha 40 seconds from the computer being totally off and pressing the power button to usable desktop is okay by me, I just wanted to know if it could be pushed more

 

[memadmax]

meh, it was worth a try =D

 

[p0rtal]

Also, hibernation mode is only a few seconds faster, around 34-35 seconds compared to the 40 from a normal shutdown and bootup. Hibernate also adds the switch user screen so technically its more like 36 seconds to use the mouse and click the resume button.

 

[Delengowski]

Another option:
You might consider using your SSD for your PAGEFILE and HIBERFIL. Google that.

I'm confused by this, I thought you can't use a seperate drive for your pagefile.sys and hibernation.sys

 

[nukemaster]

You can move the page file(in performance), but not the hibernation file.

If you get a SSD again, you can move games and steam to the hard drive(they will not know the difference). Please do NOT try to move the hibernation file this way.

If you setup a junction, you can tell steam it is on c: when it is in fact on your hard drive. I use the same idea to tell games they are on c: when they are in fact on my SSD

The lazy way is to use Junction Link Magic.

Do not mess with the links that are already on the system, just install steam, copy the contents of it to another folder on your second drive. (IE d :/games/steam) Make sure the steam folder is now empty, then link it.
http://www.rekenwonder.com/linkmagic.htm


Uploaded with ImageShack.us
Note i did move a single steam game, but you will want to move all of steam.

 

[p0rtal]

Either way, I dont think I can put anymore into this rig ha, a 500gb solid state would get things going but again wouldn't last long :[

 

[acoriano]

Have you tried deleting the stuff you don't need?