What Is Your Computer's Boot Time?
By Sam
@sammyspam (374)
Australia
April 22, 2009 12:42am CST
My friend and I recently had a competition to see which computer could boot up faster, we spent an hour optimising our computers to try beat eachother.
I got a 35second boot with Windows XP. How about you guys?
3 responses
@WebMann (4731)
• Canada
22 Apr 09
My system used to boot really fast, when I was using Win XP but I decided to upgrade to Vista and now I am suffering big time lagging.
I tried to buy more RAM for my computer but I still use DDR(1) and my computer will only take two modules. DDR 1 is only made as high as 2GB and that doesn't seem like it's enough because I am still taking a long time between each step I take on my PC.
It looks like I may have to buy a new DeskTop PC. Hopefully I will be able to just connect my old drive and not have to reinstall. That's always a pain.
@Wolfeheart (59)
• United States
22 Apr 09
Honestly, you might want to try reformatting and testing out the Beta version of Windows 7. Im an ex Vista user, and this computer runs quite a lot faster with the same components- the only thing I changed was the OS!
@amitksing (1323)
• India
30 Apr 09
I haven't checked it with clock, but I think its somewhere around 40 seconds these days. Actually it depends. When I install XP on my system, initially it shows very fast boot time, around 20 seconds, but as I keep on flooding the OS drive with data and install applications, the boot time increases gradually.
I had a same competition with one of my friends, and I fooled him by resuming my computer from the Hibernate mode, and he thought my Computer is super fast.. He He 
@amitksing (1323)
• India
1 May 09
Yeah, and this is one of the chief reasons I go for formatting my system every couple of months and installing a fresh copy of the Operating System.
@sammyspam (374)
• Australia
1 May 09
Thats a neat little trick to fool your friends! 20seconds sounds about right for a fresh computer, but of course it slowly slows down. Its a pity that computers get cluttered with junk and slow down qutie quickly. No matter how much cleanup you do I dont think its ever possible to get it as fast as the first few days, unless you re-install your OS from scratch.
@Wolfeheart (59)
• United States
22 Apr 09
Not bad, but if you're really hunting for a quick boot, go for a stripped-down linux OS with a smaller hard drive, maybe 20-30 gig. Just like the rule that smaller partitions run faster, smaller hard drives run faster as well.
@sammyspam (374)
• Australia
22 Apr 09
My computer used to take a whole minute to bootup (i have a 1 terrabyte hard drive) I recently split this hard drive into 50GB/950Gb partitions. The 50GB holds all windows files and the computer boots off this partition, the reamining 950GB is used for my documents, games, programs, movies and music.
