True or False? 10 Tweaks to Speed Up Your PC’s Boot Time (Part 2)

Does it take an eternity for your PC to boot up? Have you trolled the web for some tips on improving it? There’s some good advice out there; unfortunately, there’s also some really bad advice as I discussed last week. In this blog post, I’m going to finish off my extensive boot optimization analysis and debunk four more prevailing tuning tips.

#6 – Turning off start-up programs

Turning off unnecessary start-up items is one of the more effective ways to improve boot time. Some third-party applications tend to slow things down quite a bit. Of course, this depends on your system, but it’s always a good idea to go through the list of start-up entries and get rid of some of the programs you’ll absolutely never or rarely use or need. And if it doesn’t improve boot time, it might reduce annoying pop-ups that inform you about actions you never wanted or needed to know about in the first place.

On my MacBook Air, I disabled 19 start-up entries, and on the Asus tablet, I got rid of 25 entries.

MacBook Air (Windows 7 32 bit)

(Seconds)

Asus EP121 Tablet (Windows 7 64 bit)

(Seconds)

Interesting! Both machines didn’t show significant improvements in boot time; the desktop didn’t show up much earlier, and the overall boot time didn’t decrease. Again, this is due to the fact that Windows 7 is great at parallel operations. All of these start-up entries didn’t cause a massive delay in boot time. Still, turning off start-up entries makes for a massive improvement in responsiveness both during the first seconds after Windows logs on and in general.

Windows Performance Analyzer shows that disk usage significantly decreased once all of the start-up entries were turned off. The above screenshot shows disk I/O operations with all of the start-up entries enabled, and the below screenshot demonstrates that much less is going on during the boot-up process when you start-up entries are disabled.

First, this means that you can start working with your computer much more quickly after logon. You’ll also regain both CPU and RAM resources. This will help speed up the applications you’re actively working with. While you probably won’t notice a massive improvement in total boot time, this tip will help you be more productive right from the start and save system resources.

Final verdict: True

#7 – Disabling devices in Device Manager

PCs and laptops come with several built-in devices or other components that users may not need; these might include a Bluetooth transmitter, an Ethernet adapter, a web camera, a firewire controller, or a sound chip. For example, I bought an external 802.11n dongle and an external Creative X-Fi sound card because these devices are of a much higher quality than the built-in ones.

Now some recommend turning off the devices you don’t need to improve boot time. From a technical standpoint, this makes sense: Windows does not need to reserve Internet requests (IRQs) and memory resources, and load up drivers, if the devices are disabled. But does it really help?

I used Device Manager to turn off the following devices on my test machines:

• Intel Display Audio (secondary sound chip for use via HDMI)
• Realtek High Definition Audio (primary sound chip)
• Realtek High Definition Audio Controller
• Webcam
• Virtual DVD drives (Virtual CloneDrive—it’s not a physical device, but it still takes up as many resources as a regular DVD drive)
• Wacom Pen input
• Wi-Fi adapter (Atheros and Broadcom)
• Asus G Sensor
• USB virtualization driver
• All USB ports/controllers

While I know that turning off all of these devices isn’t feasible (who’d ever want to turn off all of these network adapters permanently?), it should demonstrate the effect on boot time quite nicely.

MacBook Air (Windows 7 32 bit)

(Seconds)

Asus EP121 Tablet (Windows 7 64 bit)

(Seconds)

I wasn’t surprised to see boot time go down a bit. I saved two seconds on both my Asus tablet and MacBook Air once all of the devices were turned off. Personally, I wouldn’t mind these two seconds, but turning off unnecessary devices has a neat side effect on laptops—it preserves battery power!

Final verdict: True

#8 – Setting a static IP for your PC

This one comes from the day and age when receiving an IP address from the router resulted in a noticeable delay in boot time during which users couldn’t perform any tasks. Gladly, operating systems, routers, Wi-Fi/Ethernet adapters, and drivers have significantly improved since then.

MacBook Air (Windows 7 32 bit)

(Seconds)

Asus EP121 Tablet (Windows 7 64 bit)

(Seconds)

There was no improvement in boot time. However, the connection to my router was established a second or so faster, but that’s nothing to write home about.

Final verdict: False

#9 – Getting more RAM for your PC

Getting more RAM is always a good thing to do. But does it really help improve boot time if you’re upgrading from 1 GB to 2 GB or from 2 GB to 4 GB?

Since core Windows system files, drivers and basic services all amount to less than 1 GB, the boot time (to desktop) shouldn’t be affected. However, more RAM should drastically reduce swapping memory to the disk (page file). I used msconfig to limit the total memory used by both my test machines and see how memory affects boot time.

MacBook Air (Windows 7 32 bit) – 2 GB of Total RAM

(Seconds)

Asus EP121 Tablet (Windows 7 64 bit) – 4 GB of Total RAM

(Seconds)

Windows scaled quite nicely, the more memory I fed it. It was interesting to see what 1 GB of memory did to the MacBook Air’s performance. Since it needed to page parts of the memory to the page file (on the very slow disk), performance went to hell.

Final verdict: True

What really speeds up boot time

Now that I’ve shown if the most common tips out there actually do (or don’t) improve boot time, let’s recap the most effective strategies for optimizing it:

• Turn off start-up programs. Yes, I realize that this one is an ancient tip, but it still works surprisingly well. Although it doesn’t necessarily make your desktop appear any sooner (at least, not on more recent machines and with newer operating systems), it certainly allows you to launch and work with applications much earlier.
• Upgrade your RAM. I was pleasantly surprised that going from 2 GB to 4 GB of RAM still made a difference in boot time. More memory, however, doesn’t do much.
• Get an SSD. This is probably the best (albeit costly) way to make your PC boot up more quickly. SSDs are 10–100 times faster with small random read operations, and this is exactly what is necessary to make Windows boot up faster than before. The Asus tablet I tested cold boots in 17 seconds and is fully usable after that—all thanks to its SSD. I know SSDs are still a bit of an investment, but they’re worth every penny.

Any more good (or bad) boot tips you’d like me to test?