How to Speed Up Windows 7 Boot?
Posted November 10, 2008 – 11:10 am in: Windows 7, Windows 7 TweaksAs you might know, Windows 7 has got major improvements in boot and response time compared to the predecessor Vista. You can also watch the boot drag race video of Windows7 and Vista showed by Microsoft at Hardware Engineering Conference recently.
Windows 7 takes just 15-17 seconds to boot up on my (C2D 2.2 GHz, 1 GB RAM) system while Vista not less than 20. Still, you can increase the boot time performance of Windows 7 & Vista using this simple trick. Although you can tweak other settings such as services and startup items, we are focusing on a single tip in this post. Of course, you can read out our “How to speedup Windows?” boot guide for more reference.
This tip applies to the users who are running multicore processor with Windows 7 or Vista as the operating system. So, follow the below procedure to make it happen.
1. Type “msconfig” (without quotes) in Vista or Windows 7 start menu search box and hit enter.
2. Click Continue if you get a UAC prompt.By default, you won’t get a UAC prompt in Windows 7.
3. Navigate to “Boot” tab and click on “Advanced options” button.
4. Check the box named “Number of processors” and also select the number of processors from the drop down box.
5. Click “Ok” and restart to see the time difference.
6. You are done.
Note: Microsoft also mentioned the importance of this tweak in their KB959233 article recently. So, go ahead and tweak it right now!
Tags: Faster windows 7, Speedup Windows 7, Windows 7, Windows 7 how to
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10 Comments
This KB article has been removed as the switch does absolutely nothing to help boot speeds (and can be potentially harmful).
Yeah it is quite harmfull > dont do!
Utterly useless and bogus “tip”
It works great if you have multicore processor.
Are you trying to tell me the bootup in windows OS only uses 1 core?
Confirmed this is pointless and only needed for debug etc..Since its a checkbox Windows by default uses however many cores are present..
I tried this trick with my q6600 quad core with 4 gigs of ram, it booted slower. I left the setting for a day or two and tried a few times a day and it was 1-3 seconds slower then not choosing the option at all.
The second option i was told to do was to check the “no GUI boot” as this will remove the splash screen, though this didnt make a difference either.
My guess is that this may only improve a system that is a dual core only with 1-2 gigs or less memory, or is bloated with start up processes, though most of these load after windows start, some may load before welcome screen, such as lan or wireless card.( I disabled welcome/log on screen, i am just using it as an example).
To Micro:
For your system you select 4 instead of 2 because you have four processors
Dude, I tried this, and Windows Vista wouldn’t load up! Had to go into safe mode just to reverse it
The windows HAL already knows the ammount of cores your computer has. as all ready stated making these changes does nothing but make things worse.