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The Explorer: Curing Sloooooooow Restarts


Hardware and software tweaks can make your PC start much, much faster.

By Fred Langa
InformationWeek
April 10, 2000 12:00 AM

Ever wonder why some PCs start up in what seems like seconds, while other grind on for minutes before they're ready to use? "Sleep Mode" and "suspend" features help somewhat, reducing the time from when you sit down at the keyboard to when you can begin working, but everyone needs to fully reboot from time to time.

Some parts of the boot process depend on how the PC and its BIOS (the "Basic Input/Output System that controls the lowest level of hardware functionality) work together: As such, some parts of the boot up are designed in by the manufacturer and are beyond your control. They vary from brand to brand and model to model, and can't be changed, period.

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But other parts -- including some BIOS functions -- can be controlled, and can make your PC much faster starting. I'll present some of the most universally applicable Windows 9x speedups in this column, and then I invite you to join the discussion to share brand- and model-specific tips and tricks to make our PCs start faster. By the time we're done, we could have quite a collection of speedup tips!

Can You Bypass Bootup?
Sometimes, the fastest way to restart a PC is simply to bypass all the low-level hardware checking altogether. And although this trick has been around forever, amazingly few people know of it:

Next time you need to quickly restart Windows (when your PC already is running) go to the Windows Start button and select Shut Down/Restart as you normally would. But before you click "OK," press and hold the left shift key; keep the left shift key depressed until you see the words "Windows is now restarting..." This one little trick alone can shave as much as a couple of minutes off the reboot time on slower systems!

Eliminate Needless DOS-Level Startup Stuff, Method One
For several years now, Windows hasn't really needed the old DOS startup files called "Config.sys" and "Autoexec.bat." It's true that these files can sometimes be used to good effect in Windows (for example, see By the Bootstraps

for a way to gain up to about 10 percent extra "low" memory for free!), but sometimes those files end up filled with useless junk that just slows you down. Some system makers, for example, include unnecessary lines in those files; and sometimes software you add also alters those files. Anything in your Autoexec or Config file will run -- or try to run -- at every boot, so unnecessary entries there can really slow you down at every restart.

Here's an easy way to see what's in those files, and to control whether they run or not:

Click Start/Run and type MSCONFIG in the text box; hit enter. The "System Configuration Utility" will start up. This utility lets you play with various startup elements that are under Windows' control. You can click on the Config or Autoexec tab, for example, and selectively enable or disable various elements of those files via checkboxes.

But before you make any changes, click the "Make backup" button. Then, if something goes wrong, you can use the "Restore Backup" button to undo any changes you make. (Because I'm a belt-and-suspenders kind of guy, I also make manual copies of my Autoexec.bat and Config.sys files so I can restore them even if I can't get back into Windows.) Ideally, make one change at a time, reboot, and see what the effect was. If it was OK, try another change. If not, undo the change you just made. If you change many things at once, it can become hard to keep track of cause and effect.

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