Top 10 ways to Speed Up and Boot your PC faster

This is for those of you who hate standing up in queues, I mean those who hate waiting. Waiting for your system boot up might be a test of your patience. There are certain programs that are configured to run automatically at Windows start up, but in case there are too many of them running unnecessarily it might slow down your system’s boot up time as well as its performance. So how do get the system boot up faster. The first tip I might provide you is to install Windows 7. With Windows 7 you might not have any such issues, as it’s boot up time gonna take a few seconds less than what Usain Bolt took for his 200 m sprint. You might not take up my tip till the final version is out. Well, in that case you might have a look at my top 10 ways to speed up your system boot time.

1. Optimizing Bios

BIOS (Basic Input/Output system) first boots your system and then handle control of your computer to operating system. In bios usually you can do two things to boot the computer a little faster.

Set the right boot device order

This is the most common misconfiguration in computers. It is set to boot from Floppy driver or from CDROM / DVD drive and when both these fail it looks for your hard drive for boot records. That wastes a lot of time. To modify the BIOS you have press the F2 key(in some systems it is DEL key). As you enter the BIOS look for boot device order or BOOT option and set your Hard drive to look first for boot records.

2. Change BOOT.INI

This tip will help your Windows XP start up faster.Click on Start, then Run and type msconfig. Wait till a new Window pops up. Look for the BOOT.INI tab, you will get to see a box labeled Timeout, and a numerical value. By default, it is set at 30 seconds of wating time before booting. Change this to 3 seconds.

3. Dual Operating systems - Off dual boot options

In case you have more than one operating system installed in your  PC, say for instance you have both Windows Vista and Windows 7 beta installed. In that case your PC displays a menu asking which operating system you want to load. In case, if you don’t select an operating system within 30 seconds the default operating system is gets loaded.

Follow the same method as in above point.  Move to the Msconfig and select the Boot tab. Change the number to a lower setting say 5 seconds, so that you have enough time to make your choice.

4. Prefetch

This is a simple hack for Windows XP to speed up your booting.  Simply browse to the Windows folder (Ex: C:\WIndows). Look for the Prefetch folder. Delete all the files in the Prefetch folder.
In order to tweak it you need to edit a registry key. Follow the steps below

Step 1: Open regedit and browse to the key

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters

Step 2: Under this key look for a value - EnablePrefetcher

It contains 4 possible values

Set the value to 2 and reboot. This will allows us to keep the advantage of caching system files and stop clogging the system up with applications.

5. Using Starter

Starter is a lightweight utility that allows you to disable a start up program temporarily, or edit, or delete them permanently. Download and execute the utiliy. It offers you an interface that lists everything in the designated tabs - Startups, Processes or Services. You can view all the start up programs and select specific programs to be disabled. Under the Processes tab, Starter can serve a good process monitoring as an alternative to default Windows Task Manager. It allows the users to view all the running programs in more details such as priority, DLLs, thread count and many more.

Starter is compatible with Microsoft Windows 95/98/ME, NT, 2000, XP and Vista
and free for download.

6. Hibernation

Hibernation enables the system to close and open faster than the normal speed. For Windows XP you can do the following to activate Hibernation

Step 1: Go to Start >Control Panel >Power Options

Step 2: Click on the Hibernate tab

Step 3: Check the box that reads Enable Hibernation

Step 4: Click on the Advanced tab and change the Power buttons option if you want to hibernate by pressing the sleep button or the power button. Alternately, you can hold the Shift key while in the Turn Off Computer menu you can get the option to hibernate.

Step 5: Restart your PC every week or so to clear your computer

7. Clean the registry

The more the size of your Windows registry the longer it takes to boot the OS. Use registry cleaners to clean up the registry. You can try the free ones like EasyCleaner from ToniArts.

8. Adding RAM

Faster hardware enables faster boot up. There is no easier and more effective way to speed up your boot than to improve the hardware’s performance.

9. Get rid of extra users

To secure Windows Vista you might create different user accounts or a password-protected user account. However, in case you are the only person who uses the system you can save the boot time by having just one account with no password. This would speed up the time it takes to load Windows VIsta as won’t have to load the User Account log-in screen and wait for the password.

10. Defrag your drive

Defragmentation of your hard drives allows your PC to find and access the files faster. This will also help your computer to run and load faster than usual. To run the Disk Defragmenter in Windows Vista type defrag in the start button.

For Windows XP follow the steps below for defragmentation

Step 1: Open My Computer.
Step 2: Right-click the local disk volume that you want to defragment, and then click Properties.
Step 3: On the Tools tab, click Defragment Now.
Step 4: Click Defragment.