Saturday, October 14, 2006

Tweaks For Startup

You got sick of your old pentium Celeron P.C and got fed up with it and brought a new spanky Pentium or Athlon Dual core Processors!!!At first it made a sea of change for you but after a while the dreadful dreams returned to haunt you once again.


Those long unstopping bootups, frequent crashes and also slow shutdowns.About 70% of users find out that their sytems got slowed down by atleast 1/3 after few weeks of usage.When you load Windows Xp at the first it works fast but slowly as the amount of programs get accumulated it gets slower day by day.



How to shorten the time it takes for your desktop screen to appear??

No matter how fast your Pc's bootup is its not fast enough for you!!!Then here are those O/S related tweaks you can do by yourself


A BOOT Defragment is a must::

On most systems, boot defragment should be enabled by default, but it might not be on ,yours or it might have been changed inadvertently when u install softwares or any other issues.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.

To make sure that boot defragment is enabled on your system, run the Registry Editor


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.


Caution:
1.Be sure not to change any other registry strings as that could be fatal.Be cautios in your approach while dealing with regedit.
2.There are many websites which claim they can tweak your Pc's.I can't ascertain how right they are but one thing remains that --There is a website which recommends to emptying C:\WINDOWS\Prefetch directory every week.Windows uses this directory to speed up launching applications. It analyzes the files you use during startup and the applications you launch, and it 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.


The Next thing is your Hardware BIOS!!!!!


When you turn on your PC, it goes through a set of startup procedures in its BIOS before it gets to starting.So, if you speed up those initial startup procedures, you'll make your system start faster.

You can speed up your startup procedures by changing the BIOS with the built-in setup utility. Theutility you get is differnet from sytem to sytem but you typically get to it by pressing the Delete, F1, or F10 keys during startup.This opens the menu utility where u may change the following:

Quick Power On Self Test (POST)
When you choose this option, your system runs an abbreviated POST rather than the normal, lengthy one.

Boot Up Floppy Seek:
Disable this option. When it's enabled, your system spends a few extra seconds looking for your floppy drive -- a relatively pointless procedure, especially considering how infrequently you use your floppy drive(are we at all using floppys!!!!!!!!!).

Boot Delay:
Some systems let you delay booting after you turn on your PC so that your hard drive gets a chance to start spinning before bootup. Most likely, you don't need to have this boot delay, so turn it off. If you run into problems, however, you can turn it back on.


Your Registry plays an important role:Fine tune it-------

Over time, your Registry can become bloated with unused entries, slowing down your system startup because your system loads them every time you start up your PC. Get a Registry clean-up tool to delete unneeded Registry entries and speed up startup times.There are hell lot of tools on the internet just helping you on this .Use any of it.Do a google search and find them out.Read reviews and pick the better one's .

The one thing which most of this Registry-Clean up tools don't do is compacting your registry.This is most important as it reduces Registry size and decreases loading time.Registry Compactor tools is necesary after completing clean-up.Again search for the best toy!!