Windows XP Hacks [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Hack 3 Speed Up Boot and Shutdown Times

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''s a hack to help you get to your desktop more
quickly after startup, and to let you walk away faster after
shutdown.

The quickest way to speed up boot times is to use the free Microsoft
utility BootVis.exe. Although
it''s intended primarily for developers, anyone can
use it to analyze their boot times and see where there are slowdowns.
More important, the tool will also automatically make system changes
to speed up your boot time, so you don''t need to go
into a lengthy analysis of where your slowdowns are and how to solve
them.

Depending on your system and how it''s set up, you
may see only a moderately faster startup time, or you may speed up
boot time dramatically. I''ve seen reports of
improvements ranging from a little over 3 seconds to more than 35
seconds. The improvements I found on my systems were moderate7
seconds faster on one, and 10 seconds faster on another. Think of all
the things you could accomplish with another 10 seconds in the day!

The BootVis utility traces boot time metrics and
then displays the results in a variety of graphs showing total boot
time, CPU usage, disk I/O, driver delays, and disk utilization.
Download it from http://www.microsoft.com/hwdev/platform/performance/fastboot/BootVis.asp
and extract it into its own folder. Go to the folder and double-click
on BootVis.exe. To analyze how your
system boots, choose Trace Next Boot. (Choose Trace
Next Boot + Driver Delays if you want to trace delays
caused by drivers as well as your normal boot sequences.) Tell the
program how many times to reboot and run the test (the more times it
runs, the more accurate the results, although the longer the test
takes to run). Click OK, and your system will reboot. After you log
on after the reboot, you''ll see this message:

Please WAIT for Bootvis to launch!

Don''t do anything yet; the program is working, even
though it doesn''t appear to be doing anything. After
a while, you will see the screen shown in Figure 1-3. Soon after that the results appear, as shown
in Figure 1-4.

Figure 1-3. BootVis alerts you that it is working

Figure 1-4. BootVis activity graphs display how much time each bootup activity takes

A series of graphs outline boot activity and loading time. The Boot
Activity graph, shown in Figure 1-4, is the most
important and details all aspects of the boot, including how much
time each boot activity takes. Hover your mouse over an activity,
such as Driver, and a balloon tip will appear, telling how much time
that activity takes to load. To see the total boot time, hover your
mouse over the rectangle at the top of a solid black line, and your
total boot time will be displayed in a balloon tip, as shown in Figure 1-4.

The pictures and graphs are pretty, but the truth is, you
don''t really need them, because the utility will
automatically make changes to speed up your boot time. To have the
utility speed up your boot time, choose Trace Optimize
System and click Reboot Now when a prompt appears. Your system will
shut down, reboot, give you the same initial prompt as when
it''s analyzing your system, but then alert you that
it''s reorganizing your boot files for faster
startup. When the alert goes away, you can use your computer as you
would normally. If you want to determine your increase in boot speed,
run BootVis again and compare the new boot time to your previous boot
time.

1.4.1 Enable Quicker Startups with a Boot Defragment

There''s another
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
may not be on yours, or it may have been changed inadvertently. To
make sure that boot defragment is enabled on your system, run the
Registry Editor
[Hack #68], and go to:

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.

I''ve found many web sites recommending a way of speeding up boot times that may in fact slow down the amount of time it takes to boot up, and will probably slow down application launching as well. The tip recommends going to your C:\WINDOWS\Prefetch directory and emptying it every week. Windows uses this directory as a way of speeding up launching applications. It analyzes the files you use during startup and the applications you launch, and 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.

1.4.2 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:

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. For information on how to shut them down, see
[Hack #4].