Okay people. I stumbled upon this while searching for ways to improve the boot time speed on Windows 7. In the old days of XP(for me it’s old days because i dumped XP almost 5 yrs ago) we had the excellent Bootvis utility that we could use to speed up the boot process. Bootvis does not work on Vista/7 machines though and i was kinda sad that there wasn’t a similar program for Vista/7, well at least that is what i thought.
Anway i followed the instructions from this thread on MSFN boards to get the Windows Performance Toolkit:
So after doing this, to my amazement my boot times went down considerably !
Just wanted to share this with the avast! community and would be interested to hear about your experiences with this procedure, was it as successful for you as it was for me ? My PC now reboots and gets back to a completely usable state in a blink of an eye. Well almost. ;D
EDIT: Just a warning, it takes a really long time to complete all this but to my mind, it’s really worth it.
I only had to install the one hotfix to improve boot time from here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2510636 , not exactly sure of the time but has roughly taken about a third of the startup time, about 25-30 seconds to start browsing
Thank for the links Darth.Mikey, this one hot fix seems to do what the other way mentioned does but alot simpler ;D
@YoKenny: You’re welcome. Yeah it takes 6 reboots but as i said i think the end result is well worth it.
Now your PC will be restarted 6 times. After the second reboot the MS defragmentation program is running and is placing the files into an optimized layout, so that Windows will boot up faster (for the description read what ReadyBoot is). The last Reboots are training of readyBoot. After the training is finished, you'll notice a huge improvement in startup.
Also please note this:
Note! [b]DON'T USE OTHER DEFRAGMENTATION PROGRAMS AFTER THE OPTIMIZATION, USE ONLY THE INCLUDED MS TOOL[/b], BECAUSE EVERY TOOL PLACES THE FILES AT A DIFFERENT OFFSET ON YOUR HDD, BECAUSE ALL TOOL THINK THEY KNOW IT BETTER!
Just for testing purposes i let Puran Defrag do it’s optimization run after doing this procedure and my boot times rose about 10 seconds. I redid the WPT method and the boot times again went down. From now on i am only running Windows Defrag on my system partition. That doesn’t mess up the optimization that WPT put in place.
EDIT: I figured it out. The problem comes when i run Chrome in avast!'s sandbox, when i run Chrome normally the avatars work fine. Strange problem. Have to report that to pk i guess.
Glad to hear that Tech ! Yeah that’s quite a difference.
@craigb: I am going to send an email to pk, he should be able to explain it. Besides i also have a few questions with the sandbox that i want to ask him about anyway.
Hmmmmm, seems to me that 1 thing can’t be all things. So if you guys are optimizing file placement for the fastest startup, then what it this file placement doing to effect the speed of the computer once it’s booted?? Most of the after market defragers place files in a certain order, and at the fastest part of the disc for the fastest operation of the machine, but that might not be the best placement for boot time races. Faster machine response is what we are all shooting for…Right??
I was never able to get past the second boot. Always timed out on the attempt to
defrag the computer.
However, what ever it did in the first two stages greatly improved the boot up time.
Can’t tell you by how much but can only tell by actually judging how long it used to take
and how quickly I now have all of my goodies loaded. ;D ;D
