Hack 4 Boot Faster 
Some of the stuff your computer does at boot
time is of no use. Disable those features to boot faster.
The
system BIOS does a lot
of work in the P.O.S.T. phase before it gets your
system to the point where it reads boot-up information from a disk
drive to load an operating system. Some of the things that happen in
P.O.S.T. have nothing to do with system performance other than
impeding the process of getting to the operating system to run your
applications. Intel, AMD, AMI, Award/Phoenix, and the PC
manufacturers were aware of this waste of time, evaluated the events
involved, and in many cases took steps to reduce the number of items
and the amount of time the startup process takes. To that end there
are a handful of changes you can make in order to boot up faster:
- Disable Extended Tests
-
Many
systems offer the option of
allowing an in-depth test of system memory and components (an
extended test) or zipping through the system and getting to bootup as
quickly as possible. With RAM as reliable and economical as it is
(and having so much of it) and having Plug and Play operating systems
like Windows and, to some extent, current versions of Linux, the
Quick Test
mode is more than adequate, and preferred for faster boot times. This
parameter is shown in Figure 1-4 and specifies the
depth, and thus the time involved, for testing system RAM and finding
and checking the basic components of the system—COM and LPT
ports and such.
- Configure Drive Detection
-
Most BIOSes provide the capability to automatically search for,
identify, and configure different types of drives across four
possible IDE and Serial ATA connections. This parameter setting
usually shows up as AUTO in the IDE configuration choices. If you
leave the parameter for all four possible IDE or Serial ATA devices
set to AUTO, your BIOS will waste a lot of time searching for
nonexistent devices. For faster boot times set the parameter to NONE
as shown in Figure 1-5 for any unused interfaces
and connections that have nothing attached to them.
- User BIOS Regions
-
This parameter, if it exists in your setup program, instructs the
BIOS to search upper DOS memory (between 640 KB and 1 MB) for the
existence of additional BIOS extension code. Such code exists on SCSI
host adapters and on network cards that provide the ability to boot
from a network server. Most PC users will never encounter a
SCSI
interface, nor systems configured to boot over a LAN through a
network card, so
there is no need to set this parameter to anything but No, Off, or
Disabled and save yourself a couple more seconds at boot
time.
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