Need some help to decrease boot speed

[slick_101]

As the name suggests I need some help with my boot speed. This is weird. its fine booting BIOS to booting windows but then takes an age to get to the point where you are able to do everything I want to do (i.e. boot steam, google chrome, Itunes etc) And the only things that I have that start up automatically are mouse, keyboard, sound card, kaspersky and graphics card software. But say I'm in game in CSS or TF2 and when the map changes I'll be the first or second player actually in game and waiting for others... So I don't understand really. I've had a twiddle in msconfig, but only turned off the things I thought I defiantly didn't really need (but that is only one or two things).

So if any of you guys have got some tips (other than getting an SSD/hybrid hard drive as these are on my list for when money isn't so tight ) I'd be much obliged.

Cheers,

Slick

[Gerbick]

Few questions:

What OS is this?
How slow is slow? Are you talking a couple of minutes or closer to 10+?
And is the PC with the specs in your sig?

[JohnnyK]

Use a boot analyzer like Soluto. Should make it pretty clear which tasks take very long during boot.
The software is becoming a little bloatey, but it still works fine for that.

[Colonel J]

To add to the good suggestions above:

it could be your AV. I've not used Kaspersky, but in the past I've found that Avira and AVG seemed to be the thing most slowing things in getting to a usable desktop. Now using Avast which seems better.

And I've found that sometimes defragging my harddrive has speeded up boot times.

[slick_101]

@ Gerbick, it takes about 6-7 minutes or so for it to actually get up and running, this is win 7 64 bit and the specs are my Sig.

@JohnnyK Thanks for the software will have a tinker with it in a few minutes.

@ Colonel J I guess it could be Kaspersky It is a bit over kill sometimes on that it takes me upto 2 days to a full virus scan (and I don't even have more than a terabyte worth of data).

[Kamikaze-X]

If your system is taking that long to boot, then you have something mightily wrong with your motherboard or hard disk. I just recently built a Core i3 system with 4GB of RAM with avast and Steam running on boot, and it boots in around 15 seconds to a usable state.

Check the hard disk controller settings, and make sure they are set correctly.

[slick_101]

Found out its kaspersky.. takes more than 2 minutes to boot, I also don't think that having a cheap hard drive is going to help speed it up. I'm not even sure if its 5600RPM

[DigitalSignalX]

Even a slow RPM HD wouldn't cause 5 minute boots. If the boot analyzer isn't helpful, I'd suggest some registry cleaner and plenty scubbing with 3 free apps: hijack this, malware antibytes, and spybot search and destroy. See if they find something your AV has missed. After that, replacing/updating all drivers from MB, sound/vid etc because you likely have something hanging up somewhere.

[Nova]

There's probably quite a lot of stuff that runs on startup.
Use Autoruns to unclick applications that doesn't have to run on startup ("Logon" Tab).

[slick_101]

boot time has been roughly cut to 3 minutes (which is liveable but hopefully when I have enough spare cash I'll probably be buying myself a hybrid HDD/SSD So you can get the best of both)

[Kamikaze-X]

the hybrid SSD/hard disk is pointless. Its literally just a small SSD and a hard disk with a storage controller in between... just get a small SSD and a large hard disk.

I've been living perfectly with a 40GB intel X25-V as my boot drive, which with a full Windows 7 x64 install still had 12GB of space left, then you just install as much as possible to your storage drive. The boot times were game changing for me. You can get one for around £45 if you know where to look.

I recently upgraded to a 64GB crucial disk which has better read/write times, and having a PC that boots in seconds (12 to be precise) is wonderful- and the specs of my PC look ancient compared to yours (Core 2 Duo E6600...)

Think about it. An SSD will be a much cheaper addition than a hybrid drive, and will be much more useful.

[QuantaCat]

I recently heard, and I was surprised by this, because I thought "Well, weve come a long way, weve got quad cores and windows 7 and so on" BUT: Keep your desktop clean. Not "organised" but EMPTY. Also dont make stuff autostart, or start to tray.

Also, type in "msconfig" when you hit the start button, there you can switch on and off autostart registries and stuffs which you might not be able to stop again in the task manager, or not easily, atleast. (though remember which ones you deactivate, in case something doesnt work afterwards)

[Nova]

@QuantaCat

Well because other than our CPUs, GPUs and the ever increasing RAM hard disks are still (more or less) agonizingly slow.
As Kamikaze-X said, get a SSD for your boot partition. You will be surprised.

[TailSwallower]

it could be your AV. I've not used Kaspersky, but in the past I've found that Avira and AVG seemed to be the thing most slowing things in getting to a usable desktop. Now using Avast which seems better.

This would be my thought too. I used Kaspersky for a time after I had a bad virus and Kaspersky was the only program that could hunt that particular one down. Windows starting up would take about 20 minutes, but then after that it was fine. Because I'd just rescued my computer I wasn't too concerned about how long it was taking and must've put up with it for the full 12 months that I had a licence key.

My guess is that Kaspersky stops everything else while it updates itself and runs various diagnostics.

[Harlander]

This might be a bit too obvious, but can you use hibernate rather than doing a proper shutdown? It saves the memory state to the HD before turning off, and it's a lot quicker.

[QuantaCat]

Thats what I do every single time, you can even shut the power off, completely, and it will still boot from the last "save".

[ntw]

I'm sorry, I have to say something. I really didn't want to and I've resisted for ages but...

You want to decrease boot speed?

[Dirtbox]

I recommend trying Soluto. It's basically a bulky, but friendly msconfig but is far more powerful.

http://www.soluto.com/

edit: Wait - decrease??

Then stick a load of program shortcuts into your startup folder maybe.