Vista - Speed up Vista boot times?

I'll admit, Im picky, but people like modding their cases, I like to have a fast, smooth system.

My rig:

Quadcore 3ghz QX6850
Asus motherboard (forget the model #)
8GB DDR2 RAM @ 800mhz
2 500GB HD's
1 150GB "boot" drive
1 10000k rpm 35GB Raptor drive.
2 x 800gtx in SLI mode


The "problem" - Vista boot times. The fastest Ive ever managed to get it was 25 seconds, thats from the moment you see the green bar, to the moment the desktop appears. Ive all features on (effects etc) along with the sidebar, resolution is 1290 (?) x 1080 on a 50" plasma TV.


Now granted, 25 seconds isnt long to wait, however what I DONT understand is how my girlfriends Sony Vaio laptop (around 1.5ghz dualcore, 1GB RAM) loads Vista (all be it 32bit) in 19 seconds.

Surely having 8GB RAM means faster boot times?

I originally thought that my RAM was too slow (533mhz) so upgraded to 800mhz (fastest I can go) but no effect.
I then read about Raptor drives being FAST, so installed one purely for the OS, it makes marginal difference.

Ive altererd the boot to show 4 processors, timeout delay 3 seconds, nothing to be started at startup.

Ive even installed a stripped down version of Vista 64 HomePremium, taking out loads of things I dont use, again doesnt make that much of a difference.

Ive heard of others getting their system to load (with the same config as mine) in 12 seconds?!!

Again, yes this is truly, truly picky, but hoep someone can shed some light on this forum as to why a system 4 times faster and more powerfull.. takes longer to boot up?

Looking forward to your replies.
Dave

Have you tried going into the bios and disable any unused devices

I have a Q6700 @3.33Ghz, 8GB DDR2-667 ram and 3 TB HDD (Hitachi) and my vista starts up in 10 sec after the green bars appears

I did disable the second NIC, onboard serial and parallel ports, and the Jmicron controller on my ASUS board

Try it, see if it helps

Kevin

Disabling those on the BIOS or through device manager?
The mobo I have is:

Asus p5n32-e


oh you have alot going on at startup, whats your screen res etc?

EDIT: I disabled the LAN controller x 3, no difference in BIOS

I go to the bios to disable the devices that i am not using

I have a 8800 GTS 512 at 1680 x 1050 and the start up is clean

Nothing in the start up folder and i use regedit to clean the startup program to nothing....not even the three drivers/programs that nvidia installs with its drivers

Kevin

there's nothing else to shut down I think. No items under msconfig startup, are there hidden ones in a filder then and what are you registry cleaning proceedure?

another thing I noticed was that if I disable all other hard drives, nothing will boot at all, I get an error stating boot manager etc wasnt found, this appears to be on another drive.. would that do anything?

Also, cant you create a ram disk of sorts and basically load the entire OS into RAM, considering there's so much of it? That would act as a SSD then wouldnt it?

Hi Tomkat2006,

You can sift through this to see if there is anything else that can help speed it up for you.

Speed Up the Performance of Vista

Shawn

open up the registry editor

go to Hkey_local_machine\software\microsoft\windows\currentversion\run

I got rid of all those entries in this key

Please proceed with caution, i do not want to be responsible if you mess up your registry

Kevin

It's safer to use MSCONFIG (<WinKey>+<R>, MSCONFIG, <Enter>) and then to disable items in the Startup tab. That way, if you lose some functionality by disabling the wrong thing, you can get it back quickly.

Make sure USB legacy support is active in BIOS. If not, then Windows has to load all the drivers for your peripherals itself, slowing down the boot up process considerably.

I know my HP desktop came with it disabled for some strange reason and I was having boot times of 2 to 3 minutes since Windows had to find and activate all my hardware connected to any USB port every single time I booted or restarted.

look at your super fetch, this can slow down the boot time.