Community poll forum: How long does it take for your computer to boot up?

Under Vista the 'power' button defaults to Sleep mode instead of actually shutting the system down, so you can be up and running in less than 30 seconds. When actually shutting down it takes a little over a minute after being tweaked. (All unnecessary services have been disabled.)

John

Using Windows Vista I have been taking advantage of the sleep option, where the computer seems to be switched off - there is no noise and no power usage. When the pc is asleep and I press the power button, it just takes a few seconds (less than 5). When I start the pc after being switched off, it takes just under a minute or so.
I do not have a state of the art computer system, mind. It's 3.2GHz Pentium 4, with 1GB of RAM. It's actually rated 2.2 on the windows experience index, and that's not too jigh a level.

That's amazing. Are you using a SSD or a RAID?

That's from power on to desktop but still loading some services. I never use hibernate and do static IP addressing so can get on the web almost immediately. If ya' don't junk 'em up they run better.

Saved probably 45 seconds for post-login loading time when I upgraded from a 5400 to 7200 RPM laptop hard drive. This is a Core 2 Duo (1.6GHz) processor, which I believe does also help loading times, since it gives more time to the hard drive to work. If you count loading Firefox after I'm logged on, then my "loading" time is just over 2 minutes.

Another utility that can decrease your load times pretty substantially is called "TuneXP". Use this at your own risk (and many of the other tweaks can be undesirable), but the option "Ultra-fast booting" will take your boot files and line them up sequentially so that there is almost no seeking when you boot up. The effect is close to reading one large file instead of many small ones. This can save at least a few seconds, which is more than it sounds when you're fixing a computer problem and have to reboot a lot.

Windows XP on a 4 year old Dell with a broadband always on connection.

From pushing the button to the point where I am on the internet is about 2-3 minutes. When the Desktop has loaded with all it's icons and the taskbar, certain utilities like ZoneAlarm are still going through their own checks, and I don't get a usable connection until ZA settles down.

Mark

I have a very new computer that my brother put together for me that has 320Gb hard drive and 1Gb RAM. I also have 92% free on this wonderful machine, therefore it boots up quickly. Not much to load up. I am running Win XP as my OS.

well my computer boots up fairly fast becouse i found out if you have enough memaery in your computer it will boot up quicker and you need a good procesor in side

I run Windows Repair Registry Pro to clean and defrag the registry at least once a week, takes only a couple of minutes for the app to do what it needs. Also use msconfig to eliminate all but the essential items at startup. Running XP Pro with a 3gig cpu and 2 gigs of RAM, set up on a mobo with SATA hard-drive. I think the most improvement has been with the registry cleaning, it eliminates a lot of garbage.

I have 4 computers, two of which are set up to dual boot. Here's how they perform:

Sharp notebook using a Transmeta Efficion CPU & 1GB RAM:
2 minutes to boot WinXP
<1 minute to boot Kubuntu Linux

HP a1450n using an AMD Athlon 64x2 4200+ CPU & 2GB RAM:
4 minutes to boot WinXP Media Center Edition
<1 minute to boot Mandriva Linux

Old Compaq Presario using some sort of Pentium & 512MB RAM:
<1 minute to boot Ubuntu Linux

Small homebuilt using a VIA C7 CPU & 512MB RAM:
<1 minute to boot PCLinuxOS

Draw your own conclusions...

Tune Up Utilities does the bizzo! i can make it faster but this suits my usage, you have to play around and find out which programmes or functions are important to you, Zone Alarm always helped too but then it started fighting with Incredimail and now i dont have either of them and the PC is running like new, I,m currently trying out Sygate free firewall and i`m very happy with it so far!

I have a 3-4 year old Emachine T6412, 2.2 Ghz AMD-64, 1 G RAM so nothing special or particularly fast. I do have quite a few programs set to load, RoboForms, Security Suite, Yahoo Widgets, Lclock, POP Peeper, Windows-X, XP to Vista Transformation Pack, etc.. but remove all other crap regularly and monitor changes regularly. My cold boot time is 48 seconds with all this. Another suggestion is limit the number of desktop icons you have, create Desktop folders if necessary and then place all icons in various folders, such as one for games.

Two computers, one 2007 XP-laptop, push start first.
Mac mini OS-X 10.4 starts next. Mac is online and sync-ing the Palm-PDA, before the XP-lap is ready to login.
I sync the PDA.Then, I turn off the mini,
and can finally check Email with the XP-lap.
Maybe 80-90 seconds to get going in XP-land?
And turned on-used-and--off Mac-Mini is about 120 seconds complete.
Enough said?

15-20 seconds on Windows 7 with an SSD as the boot drive. Your Macs STILL waiting for TRIM support....way superior.

Talk about biased.

Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 6600 @ 2.60GHz (2 CPUs), ~2.6GHz
Memory: 2046MB RAM
Hard Drive: 450 GB Total
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX
Monitor: SONY SDM-HS75P DVI-D
Sound Card: Speakers (High Definition Audio Device)
Speakers/Headphones: xfree 5.1 surroundsound
Operating System: Windows Vista Ultimate (6.0, Build 6000) (6000.vista_rtm.061101-2205)

only runing a few games and avg