I have a Sony laptop that takes forever to boot up. I'd love to use it in meetings at work, but it takes too long for it to get to a useable state.

It's has a 1 ghz processor with 1 gig of RAM. Any ideas on what I can do to speed up the boot process?

Thanks.

 

up the processor, remove some stuff you don't need or also remove unwanted start-up's when windows starts..

 

What is your opperating system?

 

Check the startup directory and remove things that you don't need when booting. All of the programs can be run later by using start->program.

Look through the config.sys and autoexec.bat files for stuff you don't need to run at boot time.

Run the disk de-fragmenter

It's been a while so I don't remember how but you can get a log of all the software that starts when booting. Most of it like QuickTime, updaters, etc. doesn't need to start while booting.

start->accessories->system tools->system information-> sw environment-> startup programs will show you programs run at startup but I don't remember how you disable the ones you don't need.

 

Go to:

START
RUN
MSCONFIG
Startup

Type every name into google search exactly as it shows, ex "navapw32". In the first couple of hits you'll get an explanation of what it is, if you need it to run every time you start your computer, keep it, if not, uncheck the box.

 

I would upgrade to Windows XP Pro if you do already run that for you OS. Windows Xp boots up way faster than previous MS OS's. You can try the smaller things too, defrag, checking for start-up items. You should also check the run folder in the registry to see if there are any un-needed programs starting up upon bootup. Go to start---run---type regedit, go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE----SOFTWARE----MICROSOFT-----WINDOWS---CURRENT VERSION----RUN. In that folder it houses all the registy keys that run certain applications when you startup. Make sure you check what keys you are deleting before you do it (searching on google, like quicktime.exe or something like that to make sure they are necessary services). However you can back up the keys just as easily.

hope this helps

 

I'm running Windows XP Professional. I've gone and removed everything that's not needed from start-up and I've removed one thing from the registry. It does start up a lot faster now, but if anyone knows anything else I can try please let me know. Thanks.

Btw, I'm going to run a disk defrag right now too.

 

Don't turn it off maybe

 

If you have already cleaned up the startup stuff and want it even quicker on startup you should also clear out the prefetch.

Mark

 

Forget about booting it up and shutting it down. Microsoft has done everything possible to prevent their OS from being anything but useful in that respect.

Have you tried to get the hibernate function to work on your laptop? It take about 15 seconds for my PC to fully hibernate and 15 seconds to fully recover from hibernation. I probably do an actual reboot once a month, and I move between three different offices, sometimes multiple times in one day.

Hibernate takes a complete snapshop of your memory, copies it to disk, and turns the laptop off. There's no power consumption when in hibernation. When it restores, it just loads the snapshot from disk and your ready to go. Grabbing the snapshop from disk is what saves so much time. Plus, once started back up, the PC is just how you left it before you hibernated.

I've got my power button on my Dell 4150 configured to hibernate/un-hibernate when I press it. I'm sure Sony can set something up like that too. Usually it's a mix of the PC's bios and the operating system config to get hibernation to work. It'll also want to permanently allocate a section of your harddrive the size of your RAM when you enable hibernation in the configuration.

My laptop is used to develop software, so I have two database servers and a huge number of applications running on it all at once. If I rebooted every time, I'd spend half of my life waiting around for this damned thing to start up and shut down. Hibernation fixed that problem.

Chris.