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 | Disable Floppy drive Seek. When your computer
turns on, the BIOS automatically accesses the floppy drive,
regardless of whether there is a disk in it or not. Disabling this
feature can speed up the booting by a couple seconds. This can be
done in your BIOS setup. (not
needed, can be done via, the
System Control Panel applet (Start/Settings/Control Panel/System, or
right-click My Computer and choose Properties). Select the
Performance tab; click the File System button; select the Floppy
Disk tab; and uncheck the option "Search for new floppy disk
drives every time your computer starts." )
| Enable "Quickboot". Many newer machines
come with a BIOS feature called Quickboot or Quick POST. Enabling
this option makes the system bypass some of the normal tests it
would do on boot up normally. It makes the process faster, but
increases the chances of a hardware problem going undetected because
the system doesn't catch it at the start.
| Remove the Boot Delay. Some PC's have an option
to delay the booting for a couple seconds. Mainly, this is done to
give the hard drive a chance to get going before the BIOS needs it.
You can try removing it to speed things up, but you may find you
need it after all.
| Edit the Standard BIOS Setup. By default, many
BIOS setups have all four IDE channels set to AUTO, in order to
auto-detect the settings for the drive on that channel. If you know
a particular channel is not being used, you can disable it so that
the computer does not waste time looking for it.
| Turbo Frequency. Some BIOS versions have an
option for turbo frequency. Enabling it speeds up the bus speed
slightly, offering a speed increase. It is, in effect, overclocking,
but it is so minute that it will be no harm done as far as your
hardware is concerned. |
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Optimizations
| Tune up the registry. Over some time of
installing and un-installing software, your registry becomes
bloated. It may contain entries that are no longer needed. The
killer is that this bloated registry is loaded each and every time
the system is started, whether it is all needed or not. There are
many software titles out there that are able to scan the registry,
detect orphaned entries, and remove them. The result is a
streamlined registry. If you have a general feel of how the registry
works, you can try deleting old keys manually. You can also try
third-party optimizers.
| Defragment Your Drive. This is an easy, fast way
to speed up your hard drive by making sure it does not have to
search all over itself for file fragments.
| Filter the StartUp folder. Filter? Well, what I
mean is to go through the StartUp folder and make sure that there is
nothing there that is unnecessary. It may be that Windows is loading
up software that you no longer need, and that is a waste of time. To
fix this, go to the Start Menu, Settings, TaskBar. Click the Start
Menu tab, click Remove, browse down to the StartUp folder, expand
it, and then remove any program from that folder which is no longer
needed. More often, though, your computer is starting programs that
are not showing up in the Startup Folder. You can also type
"msconfig" at the Start Menu/Run prompt and control all of
your startup programs and/or services. This easier method, though,
is not available in Windows 2000. You will need to use a third party
utility or, alternately, you can manually remove startup programs
via your registry. To do so, type "regedit" at your Run
prompt and navigate to:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Run
in your registry. You can then remove any entries that should no
longer be there. Be careful when doing this via the registry, and it
is always a good idea to backup the registry first.
| SysEdit. Go to your start menu, run and type
"sysedit" and press enter. Here you can edit all your
basic OS config files and remove anything you know you do not need
anymore. If using Windows 2000 or XP, you can probably REM most of
the lines out and be perfectly fine.
| "Bootvis.exe". for Windows XP users
only, this program can shave time off of your boot process. I have
not personally tried it, but have heard about it and thought it
worthy of mention if you wish to try it out. It is available here. |
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