is there a way to speed up boot up time?

it gets kinda annoying waiting 1:30 to go from POST to desktop

w00t, i made 100 posts +1

My system boots pretty quick for what it's worth (an old K6-2 @ 400 MHz with 144 MB of RAM).

I've disabled unneeded services with Start > Run > "services.msc".
I have very few startup items.
Visual effects are off.
I keep my disk defragmented often.

And of course, adding more memory is a good thing to do, too - adding a 64 MB stick on another old box I've got made it a little faster.

ill give the services thing a go

windows 2000 has visual effects?

He means the stuff that can be turned on or off in Display Properties' Effects tab.

Other than that, the essential points have been mentioned. Strip out unnecessary services, tidy up the autostarts, have at least 128 MB of RAM (upgrading from 96MB gave my old box a huge speed boost).

Using the Ntdetect and Ntldr (be sure to replace both of them at the same time) from Windows XP/2003 (preferably 2003 as it's newer) will remove the small delay when booting where there is that white bar where it says something like "starting Windows 2000" (just before the boot screen appears).

In addition to everything else, I would disable uneeded devices in Device Manager. Also if you can get a license use XPlite (http://www.litepc.com/xplite.html) it supports both XP and 2000 and start removing more stuff, thus speeding it up.

In XP drivers are loaded all at once, while 2000 they load one after the other, significantly slowing it down.

I think that's why using Ntldr and Ntdetect from newer versions speeds it up slightly, as they make them load all at once on 2000 too.

I've also read 2000 loads the whole registry into RAM when booting whereas XP only loads the necessary hives and dynamically loads others when required, so this could be another reason XP boots faster than 2000.

I always found 2000 slow to boot but unbelievably reliable so maybe a boot up time trade off is worth the reliability.

Yes, I agree. It could be bothersome on a notebook but then there's standby and hibernation.

does anyone have those files from 2003?

is that allowed?

It should be allowed, 2003 is available from MS as a free trial so you could always download that and get them that way.

Downloading only the SP2 (or even SP1) for 2003 is enough to get the files, just extract the file with WinRAR or the /x switch.

id use 2k3 but its not a very good desltop os

ill dl sp2

thatnks for the info

Server 2003 can be quite a good desktop OS even though it's not intended to be used as such if configured correctly. My impression is that it feels faster than XP then.

It is way faster than XP, even if you use it for both, server and desktop stuff...

can it have wmp11?

Yes, but I don't know if it installs without any modifications.

hmm

maybe i shoud just install xp pro?

You probably should, with that hardware it should run well, just disable services and startup tasks. I run XP on much weaker hardware (of course those are all nLited installations).

i installed xp pro

pretty darn fast after a good few tweaks

thanks for your help guys

it's better to use nLite because you don't need to buy a new tool and all files are removed from CD, so the install time is shorter

They only have downloads for XP and XP x64 - I tried various methods that I could find a while ago to try to get it to install on 2003 but none of them seemed to work (Datacentre 2003 R2 SP2). Do you know of one that does? (I tried this just now but upon trying to install wmfdist11.exe was told that I had the wrong version of Windows, while browsing to the folder where wmfdist11.exe extracts its files to, editing the update.inf for it and trying it then opens the hotfix installer but then it complains that the integrity of update.inf couldn't be verified)

Windows 2000 only loads the system hive during the Text Mode Boot. It loads the rest dynamically during the graphical boot phase.

How about this? Let's push the ON button on my computer. Good. Now go make some coffee. I guarantee you when you get back, Windows 2000 will actually START loading.

400 Mhz Intel Celeron
256MB RAM

It's never done this before 2007 for some reason. It's not Windows 2000, it's the BIOS or something! Every day, the boot POST time increases a second. I seriously cannot wait for my iMac or a new computer at least.