Make Vista shutdown and boot faster
By Jonathan Schlaffer
Vista, like its predecessors will be fast when you first boot it and for a few weeks after but like every other version of Windows will get slow, here are some tips to help curtail that but you will still have to do the occasional reinstall to get all your performance back.
In order to make Vista boot faster, the only thing you can really do at this point is defrag the hard drive. After opening and closing files all the time, these files become spread in fragments all across the hard drive, increasing seek times, defragmenting puts them back into one contiguous spot and some utilities even have options for optimizing boot by placing the boot files and startup programs as close to the start of the drive as possible.
Windows XP users have the option of using BootVis but if you don’t know how to use that tool, don’t, it can really mess up your system if used wrong. Sadly, it does not run under Vista which is a real shame because it’s an awesome utility and really does something to improve XP boot times. Used with TuneXP (also not compatible with Vista) it’s a lethal combination for shortening boot times.
Word on the street has it that using this manual defrag command “defrag c: -b” at the command prompt, where c: is your primary boot drive, will defrag the boot files and move them so Vista will start faster. The problem with this method is there is no progress bar so you just have to sit and wait for it to finish. People wonder why I don’t like command line and command line tools, this is one of those reasons, basically I always need to know when/how soon something will finish or at least get a rough estimate from a progress bar.
The built-in defrag utility of Vista is just as lame as the command line version, it will only notify you when it is complete. My favorite paid options for a defrag utility are Perfect Disk and Diskeeper but if you can’t/don’t want to pay for one then it’s hard to be Auslogics Disk Defrag which is compatible with Windows 2000, 2003, XP and Vista.
Even if defragging doesn’t really help your boot performance (this will vary) it will still help improve application load times when the operating system is finally booted up.
That covers booting but there is one quick edit to the registry that can make Vista shut down quicker than you can say “shut down.” Those not comfortable with delving in to the registry had better not proceed because making a mistake here could (and usually does) mess up your system bad.
At the Start Menu, type “regedit” without the quotes in the search box and hit Enter. Find HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Control and go to the Control folder, right click the entry “WaitToKillServiceTimeout” and set the value to something lower, 1000 is usually good (the numbers represent milliseconds). The default value is a (too) generous 20000. However, the cost with this is that it won’t give running programs much time to save data so losing work using the tweak is a definite possibility.
There are some more tweaks that can be found right here but many of them (save for the one above) can be done automatically by the free version of TweakVI.
I just want to say again that it’s a shame that BootVis and TuneXP don’t run on Vista because these were the two best tools for improving performance in XP.
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November 12th, 2007
Yeah, Bootvis is/was awesome for XP. Unfortunately, it’s not available on the Microsoft site anymore, I think; but you can still download it for free off other sites.
I also use Diskeeper Pro for my defragging needs, and it is a very good program. I can also do boot-time defrags with it to fix a fragmented MFT and paging file. I may be wrong, but I suspect auslogics lacks this feature?
November 12th, 2007
You’re not wrong… Auslogics does lack that feature but it is also free, not that Diskeeper is all that expensive but some may be unwilling to buy a defrag program for a home computer.
November 13th, 2007
Everyone has their own take on fragmentation, some dont bother for years others run it every week, even daily and feel its like an epidemic that catches on if ignored. I never used to bother but of late i have found that the system is much smoother when fragmentation levels are kept under control.
November 22nd, 2007
Hm, thanks i changed the values to 2000 so Il hope this dosnt mess up my system!!
February 3rd, 2008
I have recently upgraded from XP to Vista, and just only impressed by Vista’s new looks and appearance…nothing else. But really its exhausting the way it boots up and shuts down. Also too irritating. Yes defragmenting once a week is my duty, and I do it taskfully. And I am using Vista Manager which is really superb in its functions and performances (at least in my case).
March 14th, 2008
You know, it’s not free, but it might help some of you guys out. I ran accross this nifty new defragmentation software that might be what you guys are looking for. I’m not sure if it will work for you, but it does have a free trial.
http://www.raxco.com
April 13th, 2008
This may not be a solution for everyone but ….
My boot times were almost twice normal after SP1.
Shutdown even worse.
My problem resulted from a “stuck” ReadyBoot plan.
There is a real good explanation of ReadyBoot here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc162480.aspx
I started off by tracking my boot times in the Event Log Viewer in log Microsoft-Windows-Diagnostics-Performance/Operational.
Average boot time prior to SP1 was 93 seconds.
After SP1 the average was 160 seconds.
Of note was the BootPrefetchInitTime which was 47 seconds before SP1 and 0 after.
Also, my shutdown times had gone from 47 seconds to 232 seconds.
As mentioned in the above article I checked %SystemRoot%\Prefetch\Readyboot and found the trace files (.fx).
They were all date-timestamped from prior to the SP1.
In addition Event Log Microsoft-Windows-ReadyBoost/Operational EventID 1016 always showed Valid Boot Plan Obtained: true prior to SP1 and false after SP1.
This is the real indicator that you have the same problem as I did.
I could find nothing from Microsoft about a remedy except a performance measurement whitepaper for OEMs http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/sysperf/Vista_perf.mspx.
It states: “If you make significant system configuration changes, you should remove the \Windows\Prefetch directory on the system drive and all its contents. This removal eliminates any stale prefetch data, but you must then retrain the system.”
Not wanting to “retrain” my whole system, I removed only the contents of \Windows\Prefetch\Readyboot
Results:
Prior to removal: ShutdownTime=232670ms, BootTime=129123ms, BootPrefetchInitTime=0ms
1st Boot after removal: ShutdownTime=149441ms, BootTime=141811ms, BootPrefetchInitTime=0ms
Note: after this boot EventID 1016 showed Valid Boot Plan Obtained: true
2nd Boot after removal: ShutdownTime=149980ms, BootTime=67406ms, BootPrefetchInitTime=37805ms
3rd Boot after removal: ShutdownTime=67838ms, BootTime=60677ms, BootPrefetchInitTime=61960ms
The system reboots now feel the same as before.
Hope this helps
April 15th, 2008
good news:
Bootvis is back for Vista SP1.
Microsoft recently released the “Windows Performance Tools Kit”
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/…sysperf/perftools.mspx
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc305229.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/sysperf/perfanalyzer_onoff.mspx
which is basically a new, enhanced bootvis.
Especially interesting is the xbootmgr which allows extended tracing of boot/shutdown etc. cycles.
G.
April 15th, 2008
@Georg
Thank you so much for that tip, exactly what I was looking for!
April 15th, 2008
Thank you for your post Robert Ekstrom
“I could find nothing from Microsoft about a remedy except a performance measurement whitepaper for OEMs http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/sysperf/Vista_perf.mspx.
It states: “If you make significant system configuration changes, you should remove the \Windows\Prefetch directory on the system drive and all its contents. This removal eliminates any stale prefetch data, but you must then retrain the system.””
I haven’t seen a boot time under 60 seconds ever since SP1 and it was been causing me no end of grief. Average boot time since was 2 min. After your little suggestion 58s. Thanks a bunch.
November 16th, 2008
Would this effect my wireless?? My wireless is having problems after i did this!