Monday, December 25, 2000		Article

Boot out your booting hassles

EVERYTHING in this world has two facets — one good and the other bad. Normally we take note of the bad aspect first and the good aspect is either ignored or taken note of without importance. This holds true even in the world of computers. There is one common observation, which frustrates almost all computer users. That is the normal booting time of computer. A majority of persons feel that it is an irony that no matter how fast their computer is, it takes roughly the same time to boot up, which it used to take a couple of years ago. Though there could be a marginal improvement in the booting time yet compared to the speed that a computer possesses, the booting time of the computer has not reduced in that proportion. For a majority of users, who feel that life is too fast, it is certainly a problem and needs to be sorted out for more efficient working of their computer.

Before we address this problem, it is essential to understand that booting time of any computer is not directly proportional to the speed of the processor. As in the process of booting a computer not just performs some operations using the processor of a computer, but also loads many commands and tests many drivers. Thus, having a fast processor does not necessarily mean that the whole booting process could be expedited. However the booing time of the computer could be reduced by applying some tricks and also by using tweaks.

Thus for reducing the booting time we need to observe the activity of a computer right since the beginning. At first the booting process takes some time, roughly 2-3 seconds, to provide an opportunity to press a start-up key such as F8. This is the time when after finishing the memory test and loading the system details in the form of table it waits for a while before loading the Windows. You can save time by removing the pause and make boot-up faster. For doing this, open the MSDOS.SYS file in Notepad and add the entry BootDelay=0 to the [Options] section. Other good options to reduce booting time could be to disable floppy drive seek. Normally when you switch on the computer, the BIOS automatically accesses the floppy drive even when there isn’t a disk in it. Under normal circumstances, you do not need to make it a part of booting process. Though in cases of crash or booting from the floppy drive you may need this feature. Since normally people do not keep floppy as a first choice in boot sequence, so you can disable this feature. Disabling this feature may speed up the process by a few seconds. However, this feature could be enabled, whenever a need arises.

You can further reduce the time by removing the boot delay. Many PCs have the option to delay booting for a set period. This is done to give the hard disk time to spin-up before the BIOS needs it. You can remove it to speed the things up but depending on hard disk you may discover that you need it after all. Enabling "Quickboot" option in BIOS could enhance the process of booting further. Many new computers today come with a BIOS feature called Quickboot or Quick POST. This is a good feature and depending upon the features of computer it can be applied to make booting faster. As mentioned earlier, good and bad co-exist. The bad part of this feature is that since enabling this option causes the system to bypass some of the tests it would normally perform during the POST (power on self test). Although it makes booting faster, it increases the likelihood of a hardware problem going undetected because the system doesn’t catch it at the start.

You must have noticed that normally the computer boots faster, when it is new but the booting time increases, as it grows old. Well! It does not mean that as a computer becomes old, its capacity goes down. It is simply because, due to installation and uninstallation of programs, the registry of the computer is updated accordingly and it becomes a part of the booting process. Especially in cases of programming software, it creates problems, as it all becomes a part of initial booting.

Thus larger the size of registry, higher would be the normal booting time. So it would be a good idea to use registry cleaner that are able to scan registry, detect orphaned entries, and remove them. The streamlined registry loads much faster than a bloated one. There are many software like RegClean 4.1, which are available for free on the Web and can also be downloaded easily. Further, the huge start-up list in the start-up folder is also a big hindrance in the process of booting as during booting only these resources are to be initiated, which unnecessarily take a lot of time. Thus for reducing the process of booting, one should also clean out the StartUp folder. It’s known that shareware and freeware programs are installed in the start up folder also. Even if you do not need them in start up, they crowd this folder and create a mess for booting up process.

You can delete these items from the start up menu by going to the Start Menu, Settings, TaskBar. Click the start Menu tab, click Remove, browse down to the StartUp folder, expand and then remove any program from that folder which is no longer needed.

As another measure to reduce the booting time, you must always keep boot sequence as C: and then A: and should not keep the reverse, which is normally the case in a majority of computers. If you keep C: as the first option in your boot sequence, then the time taken by the booting process to access the floppy gets reduced and thus, also saves the overall booting time.

If you are using a Cyrix-based computer, including Cyrix / IBM processors, make sure that Linear Burst is enabled in the chipset features in the BIOS. You also may want to check the motherboard’s jumper settings to see if they include a CPU to SRAM Data Transacting Mode Selection configuration. Failure to correctly configure these settings will result in poor performance.

Furthermore, you can also achieve a slight performance boost by identifying computer as a network server to Windows 95/98, rather than a desktop computer. You can do this by right-clicking on My Computer and choose properties — click the performance tab and the hard disk dialog should come up. Where it says typical role; choose Network Server from the drop down list. That’s all there is to it. Now just reboot and you are ready to go. Setting the typical role to "Network Server" optimises the disk caching properties of the computer.

These are a few tips and tricks to reduce the booting time of computer. However, before applying these tips, you must check the manual of the motherboard for various features, whether the computer supports them or not.

— Roli