The real deal on optimizing window 7 for SSD boot

[ldelossa]

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.

 

[ignatzatsonic]

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

 

[ldelossa]

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.

 

[ignatzatsonic]

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.

 

[ldelossa]

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??

 

[ignatzatsonic]

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.

 

[ldelossa]

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]

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.

 

[ldelossa]

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

 

[pparks1]

My work laptop (a 3 year old Dell Latitude E6400) runs a Core 2 Duo P8600 (2.4Ghz), with an 80GB Intel 320 Series SSD for the OS and a 160GB 7,200 RPM mechanical hard drive in the media bay slot (instead of my CD/DVD drive) and it has 4GB of RAM.

I run Windows 7 Enterprise 64bit on this machine. I just timed my boot for fun. From a power button press till the time the monitor turns on is 3.5 seconds. From the time the monitor comes on to get through the post is from 3.5 seconds to 9.2 seconds. At 9.2 seconds, it begins "starting Windows". It brings up my logon screen at 25.5 seconds. From the time I type in my password to the point where I am at the desktop with all icons loaded, it's 36 seconds.

According to event viewer, it's 38700ms

The only "tweaking" i have done is
--disabled hibernation file (just to save space on 80GB SSD)
--set system protection to 2% (just to save space on 80GB SSD)
--set page file to 2,048MB Min and Max

Since it's my work laptop, On bootup, I'm running nearly 90 processes. The msconfig auto starts my touchpad driver, nvidia nwiz, Free Download Manager, Google Updater, Trend Micro, Microsoft Lync, Java Platform Updater and Dropbox. Everything else is unselected.

As far as a laid back attitude goes, I've actually been diagnosed professionally as obsessive compulsive. I can often times go over board. As I've done computer work professionally, I find I spend less and less of my personal home time working on things anymore.

One could argue you spent more time "researching" and "testing' and rebooting to see the performance gains and this time spent would far and away exceed any gains from a lifetime of rebooting fast. But I understand the drive, desire and interest in trying to make it faster. I'm not judging, just commenting.

 

[ldelossa]

My work laptop (a 3 year old Dell Latitude E6400) runs a Core 2 Duo P8600 (2.4Ghz), with an 80GB Intel 320 Series SSD for the OS and a 160GB 7,200 RPM mechanical hard drive in the media bay slot (instead of my CD/DVD drive) and it has 4GB of RAM.

I run Windows 7 Enterprise 64bit on this machine. I just timed my boot for fun. From a power button press till the time the monitor turns on is 3.5 seconds. From the time the monitor comes on to get through the post is from 3.5 seconds to 9.2 seconds. At 9.2 seconds, it begins "starting Windows". It brings up my logon screen at 25.5 seconds. From the time I type in my password to the point where I am at the desktop with all icons loaded, it's 36 seconds.

The only "tweaking" i have done is
--disabled hibernation file (just to save space on 80GB SSD)
--set system protection to 2% (just to save space on 80GB SSD)
--set page file to 2,048MB Min and Max

Since it's my work laptop, On bootup, I'm running nearly 90 processes. The msconfig auto starts my touchpad driver, nvidia nwiz, Free Download Manager, Google Updater, Trend Micro, Microsoft Lync, Java Platform Updater and Dropbox. Everything else is unselected.

Very nice! It's breaking under 30 that calls for tweaks. Can you explain the system protection part? I'm not to sure what your referring to

 

[pparks1]

Right click on My Computer, Properties, System Protection link. See if you have System Protection enabled (restore points) and how much hard drive space they are allowed to consume.

The other interesting things about boot times is how you measure them. Is it from a power button press, or from "starting Windows"? Is it until you get to the logon screen, or the desktop? Is it after all of your system tray programs are running, or until the hard drive stops churning? Everybody reports their boot times, but nobody has a real consistent method of ensuring we are all reporting apples to apples.

For example, my dekstop machine takes almost 15 seconds to POST, but then flies. Nothing much I can do to correct that but change a motherboard at this point. So, compared to my laptop which posts around 6 seconds, my desktop would be considered slow. But from a power and performance standpoint, there is no doubt which system I would want to use. My desktop blows my laptop out of the water, no questions asked.

 

[ldelossa]

Right click on My Computer, Properties, System Protection link. See if you have System Protection enabled (restore points) and how much hard drive space they are allowed to consume.

The other interesting things about boot times is how you measure them. Is it from a power button press, or from "starting Windows"? Is it until you get to the logon screen, or the desktop? Is it after all of your system tray programs are running, or until the hard drive stops churning? Everybody reports their boot times, but nobody has a real consistent method of ensuring we are all reporting apples to apples.

For example, my dekstop machine takes almost 15 seconds to POST, but then flies. Nothing much I can do to correct that but change a motherboard at this point.

Awesome I didn't even think about this thanks!