The real deal on optimizing window 7 for SSD boot

Hey guys I got a new laptop w520 and a corsair force gt. Because I recently graduated college and I'm a complete loser I've been doing everything to get my boot time as low as possible. Currently I'm at 21 seconds full boot (monitored in event log) while on battery (higher performance) and 26 seconds full boot on battery (power saver settings ineffect)

This is what I have done and learned.

A lot of the tutorials you see online don't do a great deal to help you : what does help is the following

Keep windows temp folder clean! I have a logoff script which clears the window temps on ... logoff

Services to effect bootime - I've done a ton of testing and disabling services WILL decrease your boottime, however it's very marginal but every second/milisecond counts BE CAREFUL THOUGHT don't just follow people's tutorials go in there and google each service and really see if it's completely unusable for your system

Superfetch settings- after MANY MANY restarts I found that for the fastest times you should leave superfetch on however change the reg value to only cache boot files. This is the best of both worlds - its not caching all your large files it's only creating a cache for the system boot - something that won't change much so your SSD health can be checked.

I reduced my hibernation file to 50% but this is sketchy -- I don't know if I'd suggest this to everyone.

I reduced my virtual mem to min 512 - max 1024. I have a speculation that setting the min and max to the same value can actually help performance but I haven't done any real testing yet.

On a new boot I ran a command to update all the .net binaries. I found this tip on the lenovo support forums, you can check it out here. Boot time and Power Manager - Lenovo Community (3rd page)

So far I found no performance increase from any of the more obscure tricks such as disabling indexing.

By far the BIGGEST effectors of boottime are ... DUN DUN DUN....


Startup programs and partition alignment! - a no brainer right

Any other tips you guys found helpful please let me know! I'm sure I have done more then just this so discussion may jog the memory.

I'd like to hear the details on how you "reduced my hibernation file to 50%".

Get yourself into an elevated command prompt and type

powercfg.exe /HIBERNATE /SIZE [50-100]

I choice 50 it was the lowest.

Let me note that i have 16 gbs of ram so I know that at tops my ram is going to dump under 8 gigs especially when I'm not using my AC power - i disable hibernation for AC power.

ldelossa said:

Get yourself into an elevated command prompt and type

powercfg.exe /HIBERNATE /SIZE [50-100]

I choice 50 it was the lowest.

Actually, I eliminated mine entirely and don't miss it.

ignatzatsonic said:

ldelossa said:

Get yourself into an elevated command prompt and type

powercfg.exe /HIBERNATE /SIZE [50-100]

I choice 50 it was the lowest.

Actually, I eliminated mine entirely and don't miss it.

I'm debating this pretty heavily, however what if your on battery and your laptop dies while in sleep? Do you loose everything that was up??

ldelossa said:

ignatzatsonic said:

ldelossa said:

Get yourself into an elevated command prompt and type

powercfg.exe /HIBERNATE /SIZE [50-100]

I choice 50 it was the lowest.

Actually, I eliminated mine entirely and don't miss it.

I'm debating this pretty heavily, however what if your on battery and your laptop dies while in sleep? Do you loose everything that was up??

I have a laptop-free household.

I save stuff to the hard drive. I could not care less about anything I have not saved.

Haha thats my down fall, I have a desktop free life style and I'm always just shutting my lid hoping my battery lives long enough and that hibernation is doing it's job.

pparks1 said:

With respect to services, I found with a stopwatch that as a I disabled a few services, I would gain a few tenths of a second. However, as I disabled more and more, I actually found my boot times to start increasing to the point where my boot speeds actually declined.

I've found the absolute best way to keep your boot speeds as low as possible, is to install the least amount of stuff on your machine possible. And shut off everything absolutely unnecessary in msconfig. When I want to "play" around with new apps and see how they work, I don't just install them onto my machine. Instead, I fire up my XP Mode VM and install them in there. For 90% of the stuff that I install and quickly toss out, it saves anything from clogging up my host OS. For the remaining 10% of the apps that I actually do keep, I evaluate the benefit of having it outside of the VM and only then will I install it there.

At the end of the day, considering that I might boot my laptop 2x in a day, and the rest of the time it's asleep, I just gave up worrying about those extra 12 seconds. Seriously, I hit the button, walk away for 20 seconds, come back and it's ready.

It's funny you bring that up. I actually did ALOT of playing around with services. And you are correct when readjusting services if the system is trying to access the service for any reason this is actually slow down your boot, however, like I said I went into services and specifically made sure I only disabled ones that my system had absolutely no use for - anything with advanced group policy management - services that won't even turn on unless you enter a domain ...

It took a lot of time to tailor make the settings for my laptop - a little to much time hahaha but in the long run I'm down to 21 second boot give or take 9000ms. I don't think I can reach that without altering my services.

Haha and I admire your laid back attitude but I'm became determined and I'm a loser -- have to fill my time with something lmao