Tune Windows XP to speed up boot and shutdown times

A common annoyance for both IT professionals and end users is having to sit and wait while Windows reboots. This sample hack from OReilly's Windows XP Hacks, 2nd Edition shows how to tweak a PC's BIOS, the Windows Registry, and other Windows XP settings to streamline boot and shutdown times



Speed Up Boot and Shutdown

Shorten the time it takes for your desktop to appear when you turn on your
PC, and make XP shut down faster as well.
No matter how fast your PC boots, it’s not fast enough. Here are several
hacks to get you right to your desktop as quickly as possible after startup.
Perform a Boot Defragment
There’s a simple way to speed up XP startup: make your system do a boot
defragment, which will put all the boot files next to one another on your
hard disk. When boot files are in close proximity to one another, your system
will start faster.
On most systems, boot defragment should be enabled by default, but it
might not be on yours, or it might have been changed inadvertently. To
make sure that boot defragment is enabled on your system, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Dfrg\BootOptimizeFunction
Edit the Enable string value to Y if it is not already set to Y. Exit the Registry
and reboot. The next time you reboot, you’ll do a boot defragment.
The tip recommends going to
your C:\WINDOWS\Prefetch directory and emptying it every
week. Windows uses this directory to speed up launching
applications. It analyzes the files you use during startup and
the applications you launch, and it creates an index to where
those files and applications are located on your hard disk. By
using this index, XP can launch files and applications faster.
So, by emptying the directory, you are most likely slowing
down launching applications. In my tests, I’ve also found
that after emptying the directory, it takes my PC a few seconds
longer to get to my desktop after bootup.
Hack Your BIOS for Faster Startups
When you turn on your PC, it goes through a set of startup procedures in its
BIOS before it gets to starting XP. So, if you speed up those initial startup
procedures, you’ll make your system start faster.
You can speed up your startup procedures by changing the BIOS with the
built-in setup utility. How you run this utility varies from PC to PC, but you

Speed Up Boot and Shutdown Times

typically get to it by pressing the Delete, F1, or F10 keys during startup.
You’ll come to a menu with a variety of choices. Here are the choices to
make for faster system startups:
Quick Power On Self Test (POST)
When you choose this option, your system runs an abbreviated POST
rather than the normal, lengthy one.
Boot Up Floppy Seek
Disable this option. When it’s enabled, your system spends a few extra
seconds looking for your floppy drive—a relatively pointless procedure,
especially considering how infrequently you use your floppy drive.

Boot Delay

Some systems let you delay booting after you turn on your PC so that
your hard drive gets a chance to start spinning before bootup. Most
likely, you don’t need to have this boot delay, so turn it off. If you run
into problems, however, you can turn it back on.
Fine-Tune Your Registry for Faster Startups
Over time, your Registry can become bloated with unused entries, slowing
down your system startup because your system loads them every time you
start up your PC. Get a Registry clean-up tool to delete unneeded Registry
entries and speed up startup times.


Speed Up Shutdown Times

It’s not only startup times that you’d like to speed up; you can also make
sure that your system shuts down faster. If shutting down XP takes what
seems to be an inordinate amount of time, here are a couple of steps you can
take to speed up the shutdown process:
Speed Up Boot and Shutdown Times

Startup and Shutdown

Don’t have XP clear your paging file at shutdown. For security reasons,
you can have XP clear your paging file (pagefile.sys) of its contents
whenever you shut down. Your paging file is used to store temporary
files and data, but when your system shuts down, information stays in
the file. Some people prefer to have the paging file cleared at shutdown
because sensitive information, such as unencrypted passwords, sometimes
ends up in the file. However, clearing the paging file can slow
shutdown times significantly, so if extreme security isn’t a high priority,
you might not want to clear it. To shut down XP without clearing your
paging file, run the Registry Editor and go to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory
Management
Change the value of ClearPageFileAtShutdown to 0. Close the Registry
and restart your computer. Whenever you turn off XP from now on, the
paging file won’t be cleared, and you should be able to shut down more
quickly.
Turn off unnecessary services. Services take time to shut down, so the
fewer you run, the faster you can shut down.