w2k boot times

[dboy]

I've heard all sorts of claims around here of blazing fast boot times under w2k - 15 seconds, 30 seconds, etc. My machine takes over 90 seconds. Most of that is in windows, there's only about 20-30 seconds before the w2k stuff starts. Is there something I'm missing that would speed this up?

 

[meterin]

Do you have Promise ATA/100 drivers installed, or do you have a mobo with ATA/100? I vaguely recall that adding like 30+ seconds to boot time (at the windows splash screen)..

Check Device Manager > Mass Storage Controller.. If your not using it (and maybe someone can back me up on this before you do anything) you might try uninstalling if it's just Promise drivers. If your harddrive is on the ATA/100 then I don't know

 

[juiio]

If you use DHCP, thats usually what delays you.

 

[dboy]

I've got ATA100 on the mobo, and that's what my HD is on. Plus I do use DHCP for cable modem sharing. Sounds like that's my delays... nothing I can do about them, I need them both. Oh well... at least I don't have to boot as often as I used to (went from 95 to 2000)

 

[Jorrit]

i have an asus a7v133 with an ibm 60gxp attached to the promise controller and boot in 53 seconds. before i had a maxtor diamondmax plus 40 and it booted in 65 secs, so the hard drives makes a big difference. also the promise controller is much faster than the via ide controller; it takes off about 10 seconds of the booting time. you can move the hard disk to the promise controller after installing the drivers without a problem.
however, most of the boot time is caused by third party utilities, like a virusscanner, icq, seti@home and others. on my system the computer switches to the set resolution after 15 sec, then after about 10 secs extra windows has finished loading; the additional 18 secs are from the installed utilities.

if your dhcp server is fast it wouldn't make a difference; try setting your ip address fixed (and dns, etc) to see if it makes a difference. if it doesn't make sure you go back to automatically obtaining your ip.

 

[PeeluckyDuckee]

it differs from system to system depending on what hardware you have.

here are a few that may cause delays...
scsi controllers
boot sequence
raid controllers
ide controllers
sound cards
utilities that load at boot
etc...