How to speed up Vista boot time?

How can I speed up my Vista boot time? Currently it takes between 75-85 seconds to boot into a usable state.
Once in Vista, my laptop is very fast, and I have no complaints.
I did a clean install of Vista.
I've already disabled many services and startup programs.
I did a bunch of little tweaks I found on different sites as well... like disabling UAC, disabling TMM, disabling some Windows features like the TabletPC, indexing, turned on SATA caching, changed number of processors (arguably does nothing), turned off RDC, turned off hibernation mode, turned off system restore, etc..

The main thing that seems to be slowing the boot process is between the BIOS and login prompt.
There is a period of at least 15-20 seconds where the screen is black or barely doing anything before it jumps to login.

I tried going into the BIOS and making sure things are in order. I put the HD as the first boot device instead of CD (probably didn't save much time).

Is there something I can do to speed that time up?

 

15-20 seconds is plenty fast. I doubt you can shave that time down because there really is nothing you can do about the time it takes for you BIOS to scan your hardware and do what it needs to do to initiate the boot sequence. I hope you didn't blindly follow every tweak guide out there. Make sure that you didn't disable needed services. Some services might not be needed by the OS, but might be needed by programs.

Anyway that's about it. Oh by the way, there is a tweak that gets rid of the black flash between the Vista logo and the login screen. Might want to look into that.

 

Check out this thread from the "Please Read Before Posting" sticky thread: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=166532

 

What are your specs?

 

No, I didn't blindly disable services. I read the descriptions and disabled the ones I'm sure I didn't need and wouldn't affect Windows.

It seems like the hardware gets scanned first then goes into the black screen for Vista.

 

T400 - T9400 (2.53 GHz C2D) - 4GB DDR3-1066 running Vista Business x64.

 

is there an external hard drive plugged in during boot? because on my laptop, if i leave my wd my book plugged in, during boot it will idle for about a minute (no laptop hdd light and blank screen) while it recognizes the device. for some reason vista doesn't like it. (xp and linux recognize it quickly, its just vista)

 

No, there is no external HD or USB drive plugged in.

 

Wow nice specs. My boot to a usable desktop is 30 seconds lol. I disabled alot of unneeded services, tasks, fonts, drivers, etc. Cleaned up startup apps.

 

Thanks. I haven't deleted unneeded fonts yet, but I figured that wouldn't be the major offender. I will give that a try.

Will I save a lot of time by doing auto logon?

McGrady, do you auto login?

I just got the laptop 2 weeks ago, and I did a clean install 3 days ago, so there are no third party apps or any nuisance start up apps. I am only using the bare minimum drivers to support all the hardware.

 

GPU please??

Also, 20 seconds of that black screen is NOT fast...

For me I have less than 5 seconds of that...

I think mainly you should just check out which programs you have opening on startup...

 

Hm, thats really odd. You startup time should be super fast. I managed to get my crappy specs to decently fast.
Try typing Task Scheduler in Search, open that up and see if there is any scheduled task in Log On.

MY black screen is like 1 second flash and its gone rofl.

 

Yeah, I auto login. Much faster.

 

shoelace_510, it's integrated video for Montevina, the new 4500HD. Not spectacular by any means, but I suspect that I shouldn't have problems with a slow boot because of that. But please let me know if I am wrong.

I have no programs opening up at startup except Avedesk (and some background stuff like google update because of Chrome) and necessary stuff found in msconfig.

I suspect Avedesk slows it down a little but not much as it doesn't take up much RAM anyway. And I don't think it would affect the long time before I even get to the login prompt.

 

Did you do what I said? Open up task scheduler you can disable googleupdate from there and find out if other stuff there is hogging up your boot time. I have rainmeter, avira, rocketdock and launchy run at startup; so avedesk is fine.

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=2737834&highlight=gary#post2737834

I would say use this.

 

Yeah I disabled googleupdate, and I just auto logged in. It rebooted in 74 seconds, so it seems negligible or just chance that it was 1 second faster.

The 15-20 sec black screen before the windows vista orb lights up in the center (with auto logon) is the longest time-waster it seems.
Once I can see the desktop, it's like fast-forward.

 

Thanks Harper. I'll give it a try.

 

That black screen was supposedly fixed in SP1, but there was a tweak to TMM ... here it is

 

Well the thing I linked is a defragmenter which I usually run after installing/uninstalling some programs. It defrag's the boot files in order for your laptop to access them faster.

 

How many green bars pass by on your startup? When its loading.

 

Is there a way to decrease this amount?

 

Someone in another forum said disabling UAC can SLOW down boot. I tried it, and it made no difference on my laptop... just to let others know.

 

Yeah, sorry I modified my post because I realized I was looking at the wrong tab.
Sorry! I'm going to give it a try in a few mins and test out boot time.

 

Well yeah, if you disable unneeded services, unneeded drivers, startup apps, fonts, etc. I got mine down to 5.5 -6 green bars consistently. I'll make a video of my startup from power on to desktop later, just for you guys

 

I've done a Clean install, disabled unneeded services, startup apps are only anti-virus and side bar.

What did you do with the fonts?

 

Yeah, something is still slowing down your system. There's nothing you can really do about the pre-windows stuff, unless there are settings in bios to not check hardware/diagnostics.

What speed is your hard drive? The notebook in my sig boots in around 35-50 seconds normally, depending on how long it has been between defragments. If youhaven't already gotten SP1, get it. It really helps

 

About 12 bars pass by
I just deleted about 50+ fonts, and I am testing the effect before I get rid of more.

Ok, I got 74 seconds again.

Now I will try the defragging the boot files.

 

deathstick,
Yes, I have SP1. It's a 160GB 5400 Fujitsu drive. Not the fastest drive, but also not very slow either.
I would guess only MAX 10% slower than a 7200RPM drive?

 

now a days seagate 320gb 7200rpm drives are about $85.

 

Yeah, I saw that deal but missed it.
I don't need the extra space at the moment because I have 1.5 TB of space on my desktop that I barely use.

 

I reduced the number of fonts to 151 from 300+ and ran the boot file defragger.
Boot is down to 72 seconds, so I guess it shaved off a few seconds.
Thanks guys.

The annoying black screen is still there, but I guess it might be a lost cause.
This time about 10 or 11 bars went by instead of 12.

edit:
on a second reboot, there were 14!! bars but it took only 67 seconds to reboot. Strange but true.

 

The longest part of my bootup time is the black screen right before the glowing Vista logo. If I can get that down we have a champion.

=/

 

Yes! Exactly my problem..
I think removing fonts did help reduce time from the bar-moving screen but not from the black screen before the glowing vista orb / login if not auto logged in.

It seems like our laptops are pretty similar! Well I just have integrated graphics... but we both have T9400 and 4GB RAM (mine is DDR3 though) and LED-backlit displays!
It's so bright and amazing

 

What I did with my fonts was made a backup folder, and placed all the fonts there, then deleted all the fonts that the system doesn't use.

 

It appears I cannot remove a lot of the language-related fonts even though I haven't installed any of those languages as inputtable.

Does anyone know of a way to remove all the excess language files?

 

McGrady, Im in Vista 64, how do I know which fonts the system doesn't need? Is there a list of "do not delete" fonts?

I also disabled TMM, that black screen feels like it stays on there forever .

 

Just experienced an 18 second black screen.

What the f is going on!? It used to be 1.5 seconds or less when I first reformatted yesterday.

 

There's a list of vital system fonts on a few tweaking site, but I can't remember where exactly. Also the ones that are in use cannot be deleted so that kind of helps.

 

Okay I removed about 100 fonts, most of which were tiny in KB so Im sure that wont help. The others didn't allow me to delete, which did help.

Ever since I installed Dell Controlpoint and this fingerprint reader thing, start up has been exceptionally slower.

 

Yeah I think that disabling UAC does nothing in terms of performance. I noticed nothing but small gains personally.

 

Ok... one thing about Vista that many people don't know compared to XP is that Vista actually gets FASTER after you have used it for a while...

This is because after multiple restarts Vista optimizes itself better and better, so actually after a clean install your system should be the slowest it should ever be if you take care of it!!

Hope this helps!

 

Okay cool, Im gonna give it a few weeks then.

 

I still don't get how anyone is getting these long boot up times, especially with such good specs. I think stock, my XPS booted up in about 40 sec and after clean install I'm sitting at just over 25 sec

 

Im getting over 25 as well. That black screen is seriously feeling like forever though...

 

RAM, your boot is only 25 seconds?
I think my laptop has been rebooted enough times to have been optimized. Isn't the optimization just a function of Prefetch?

 

I doubt its that simple.

What kind of bootup time are you getting now?

 

67 seconds is the fastest I've recorded. The bar screen and the subsequent black screen before the vista orb take the longest.

 

We should look deeper into it then. It's also possible that windows needs that time to boot properly and nothing is going "wrong", but it's just using the time it needs.

A clean install will definitely fix it for you, though.

 

? I did do a clean install like I mentioned in my original post.