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Monday 17 September 2007, 10:04 PM
Boot startup times into touch
How many times when you are out on the road have you wanted to quickly boot up your laptop to find a vital piece of information? An address, a quick look at an agenda for a meeting or a double check on something crucial in a Word document?The trouble is, Laptops take forever to boot up, especially when you are in a hurry. Even though mine is only 9 months old and I'm pretty careful about what I load onto it, it takes at least 5-8 minutes to boot from cold.
Until now. I've discovered a great little utility that allows me to stagger the startup programs so that I can delay the loading of non-essential programs. Start Delay lets me specify what order programs load in and at what time. So for instance, I can delay the startup of Yahoo messenger for 5 minutes, i-Tunes Helper (whatever that is!) for 10 minutes etc. allowing me to quickly get to a point where I can start Outlook to look at a message or Word to check a document.
I have no idea how I lived without it! I'm constantly on the move with my laptop and boot it up 3-4 times on an average day so this little gem saves me loads of down-time waiting around for the hard disk to stop rattling around. Even better, it's free, go on, give it a try.
PreviousComments on this post
Why not just use the 'hibernate' or 'standby' facilities. Much quicker and you can leave work/programmes open. Also saves on 'shutdown' time
Having said that, anything which helps to boot up a Windows computer to a useful working state quicker is welcome.
That's exactly what my Mac using friends always say, apparently it works perfectly on I-books/Powewrbooks. To be honest though, I've never had much luck with/faith in either of the Windows options.
Standby flattens the battery in a about 3 of hours (despite being in a "low power state") and depending on what I've been doing, hibernate won't always work. If I've been using my T-Mobile data card for example, it won't go into hibernate mode. Even when I can get it to hibernate, it often takes as long to recover as my new boot time.
So I've always gone for good old fashioned Shutdown to make sure I conserve power and that it boots back up again fresh and ready to go.
I am not a mac fanboy but have to say that leaving my macbook on standby doesn't seem to flatten the battery nearly as quick as my other laptop (Acer) running Vista. This is something I think it varies laptop to laptop. Apple have an advantage because they make their own operating system and can directly control which components are shut down in sleep mode. Its harder for PC manufacturers because they do not make the operating system that their laptops use.
I'm waiting for the Eee PC to be released. They claim it can boot in around 15 seconds. But I'll give Start Delay a try in the mean time.
Startup Inspector is a good program to spot programs that aren't needed during startup process.
