For those with a long Boot Time, i recommand you the nice free app of the day : Startup Delayer. You can choose the moment for an app to start (for those we see in the Systray).

http://www.r2.com.au/software.php?page=2&show=startdelay

Windows will become quicker to be operationnal !

Ha… Remember when they said Vista would start up as fast as a television, compared to the long-booting XP? Look how that turned out.

I guess there’s also a difference between using a 4200rpm 1.8″ notebook drive and a 10krpm desktop raptor. New drive, full drive, SSD drive, totally fragmented drive – 15 seconds can mean anything without more specific details.

Some machines work great out of the box (laptops), then after I load all my apps and am ready to actually do things it slows down to a crawl. I remember working with one XP laptop that took 4 minutes to boot because some driver/service conflict at startup froze the damn thing for almost 2 minutes. That same machine would REFUSE to go into hibernate. I never could figure out exactly what was wrong.

I’ve seen rogue software wreak havoc with the registry to the point where it would require a reinstall or backup-restore to fix the problem. It’s one reason why I don’t play with beta-tester crowd!

Microsoft has yet to revolutionize the windows registry, give users tools to easily diagnose and repair problems with it or keep it running at top speed. Just eliminating the registry altogether would solve A TON of problems. As for services, they should be run on a start/stop as-needed basis instead of manual/automatic options that take up memory and hog CPU cycles.

But hey, 15 seconds still beats having to take a dump after you hit the power button…

theres no doubt A/V software is what bogs down most boots, just uninstall it & see the difference. but considering how much work it does (constantly running in the background scanning all opened, edited, saved files) it’s no surprise. but its a must in the Windows world.

Tim, I think the main thing to take from this is not the sped-up boot times, but that Microsoft realizes the best way for non-essential services to run is on-demand.

And yeah, I’m sick of AVG’s bloat. I use NOD32 on my work machine and find it much better. Of course, my work machine is actually a bit better than my home machine so that could be part of it ;)

even if they get it down from 23 to 15 it wont matter, by the time you add all your 3rd party apps it will slow back down. especially AV, firewall, or anything that creates deep hooks within the OS.

if this is just going to be another 1 of MS’s “tricks” to fool the average consumer like when they started having the desktop appear before the boot process was actually finished to give an appearance of a fast boot, although the machine was still practically unusable, then no thx.

take for example the most efficient A/V software out there, AVG. recently i had to uninstall it & was shocked to see how much faster my machine booted. this is a machine LOADED with programs & the last fresh install was 2 years ago, but it booted in under 30 seconds. by uninstalling AVG i knocked 25 seconds off my boot time. now imagine what bloated A/V software (i.e. Norton) cause to this problem.

Good to hear this from Microsoft, although it’s almost the opposite approach they took for Vista where they wanted to add so much new features and background processes that would speed up certain tasks, and add a few bells and whistles, but it at times just cripples the OS.

Another thing they should add is some sort of prompt on install or option/profile where it asks you what type of system you are running, is it a mobile basic device, is it a home desktop that’s always on etc… tailoring the features/performance for the type of device it’s running on. Or perhaps this could be done automatically, based on your usage and hardware specs.