Windows XP Boot Time

Oh god, I never want to see another windows boot screen again. I’ve been trying to fix some strange problems with the winbox (which didn’t get a hardware upgrade except for video and sound card, but that’s another long story). Basically these consist of it giving me a lovely BSOD a few seconds into it’s boot sequence. I finally narrowed it down to the NIC. Take it out, boots fine, put it in, BSODs with a strange IRQ message, or just a “windows has detected a problem and has shut down”. Someone somewhere suggested it might be ram, so I ran through the 4 DIMMs with no luck. Swapped around NICs, no luck… I think I eventually put it way down at the bottom of the slots and it booted! Then I slowly put hardware back in. First ram, then swapped the video card back (had a GeForce2 MX/200 and a 400 that I was using), then the sound card, then swapped the CDROM that was plugged in (that I can boot off of) for the one in the case (which can’t, but I can’t be bothered to pull it out and replace it), then finally put the case upright (and also put in the SCSI card for the scanner).


In this time I rebooted Windows XP, many, many times. In this time I learned that a Celeron 533, with a second being a count of “a thousand one” takes the following times from the selection of “Windows XP” from the boot menu:



  • 6 seconds to display the windows xp logo with the little left-right bar
  • 18 seconds for the keyboard LEDs to flash
  • 36 seconds to be booted to the user selection/login screen

Do not question me on these times! I know them off by heart now.


Oh well, updates are back installed, time to reboot some more…

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Category: Technology

3 Comments on “Windows XP Boot Time”

  1. While I like windows2000 better than XP, one thing going for XP is boot time… if you were running 2000, boot times would have been 2X to 4X as long.
    oh yeah, ob. x86 ref. 😉

  2. Yea yea… Just wait until you read about my adventures with the new hardware (this is just a taste). Of course, I can upgrade my machine to 2ghz, with the parts I want, for under $1000 🙂

  3. Everybody struggling with boottimes that hasn’t changed the IDE seek properties in the control panel for places on the IDE cable they haven’t installed yet…get BOOTVIS. IT’s a little app released by microsoft themselves to do just that…improve boot times dramatically. As with all goot apps provided by microsoft, it’s no longer available from them but a quick search in google will bring it up. Dropped my boottime from25seconds to around 15 in windowsXP. Others have had their times cut in half from around 60 to 25.
    Have fun,
    -Jay