How did it all began?

I’ve been witnessing in the past years a quite annoying phenomenon, almost daily: the inescapable, unavoidable, tedious delay when booting up a Windows based computer. Of course others operating systems take some time loading, but in my experience, Windows based computers have suffered this “defect” more than their counterparts.

You may know about the boot procedure: hundreds system files being loaded from disk into the computer memory….. drivers, DLLs , Services and so on….. your computer initializing devices connected to it, plus configuring all the software/bloatware you have installed. The more, the worst, in terms of performance.

Since the early days I have been hoping and waiting for the next/future-technology quantum-leap in terms of performance: faster disks and CPUs, increased memory size, smart architectural improvements; while some of those expectations have been partially satisfied, we have all faced a complexity growth of the operating systems (read: longer startups). So no SCSI-SATA-PCI-X-ReadyBoost-you-name-it-what solved the problem, and if it did, well… I didn’t realize!

Of course VISTA’s improved stability and improved standby management has helped us a lot: I personally keep my computer in standby until it gets unstable; while I’m writing this guide I see my current uptime is set at over 93hrs.

Weather you’re a save-the-planet person (and wish to give your little contribution to save energy consumption, shutting down your PC while not using it) or not, sooner or later you’ll need to (re)boot, and… wait!