Improving computer start time.

Factual Questions
1

Here is the deal.

Old Win-98se boxes with 300Hz CPU’s and adequate RAM. Got lots of hard drives.

Note: Do not want to upgrade, just going for improved performance for give-away puters.

Ok, the idea is to but a lightened Win-98se OS on the C drive. Nothing else.

Then put all other applications on D drive. ( Want fastest boot I can get from the machine.

Should I also put the pop-up blocker and ZoneAlarm™ on C or will launching off D be ok?

Opinions please.

Why do this you might ask. Well, over the years as I have messed with other puters, I see the Power up ‘click’ to the ready to do something point getting longer and longer. Up to 1.5 to 2.0 minutes. I also remember running a little skuzzy 7200 RPM drive that would launch Win-98 in mere seconds.

I feel that all the junk on the big “C” drives of today, for those of us that still run 98se, is what is making the start-up so slow.

Right? Wrong?

So, I’m thinking a small “C” drive that only has the bare bones OS on it can launch the fastest and let all the other applications run off “D” and store all the junk that accumulates, Email, pics, — everything else on “D”.

I know that overall speed will not be improved, I run as much RAM as I can etc. for that. ( scan disk and defrag and clean things up ) Just that I want to fire up quick and it also would allow an easy way to mirror to a backup hard drive a copy of the OS so that if it caught a bug, it would be simple to swap the hard drive and it would only be the OS, so the corruption would hopefully be less in general. ( also protection from hard drive failure )

I use spare hard drives as back up and do a complete copy each week so if I ever crash, I only have a weeks worth of loss.

So, would this give me any improvement? I have all the hardware.

Or, will it not work? I don’t want to start if it absolutely won’t work…

I have three complete computers to give away again and I want to have them as nice as possible so as to make learning and hopefully enticing people to want to improve their computer ( skills, knowledge, abilities ) hardware in the future by having this first stuff fly as well as possible.

Splain to me please…

2

You might try X Setup Pro (it’s free!) and it allows you to get in an easily tweak some of the settings which will give you a quicker start up and shut down times.

I’ve ran a PC with 90% of the programs installed on the D-Drive before, but I don’t recall if it made the start up any faster. Some programs are a bit “cranky” about being installed to the D-Drive, but I doubt if you’ll be trying to run any that refuse to install to D (you will have to tell the programs to install there, and you can’t simply move the .exe files over to the D-Drive and have them work in most cases).

3

Moving programs to another drive won’t make the computer run noticeably faster unless the C: drive is considerably slower than the D: drive. Here’s what I’d suggest:

(1) More RAM. How much is “adequate”, exactly? 512Mb is the max for Win98 (well, there’s ways around that, but it’s tricky) so if you don’t have that much, get it.

(2) Video card. When I upgraded my old machine from a 2mb card to a 32mb card, it ran much faster, especially the startup time. You wouldn’t think it would make that much difference just starting the computer, but it does.

(3) The fewer programs that load on startup, the faster it will run. Don’t bother with Zone Alarm or virus checkers unless you have an “always on” Internet connection. (Just remember to start them manually before dialing up the 'Net.) Don’t ever run Norton System Monitor, it’s a massive resource hog.

4

All things being equal, I don’t think placing applications on a separate drive will improve startup time. So long as there is plenty of free space on C: and it’s not too fragmented it should be ok. Installing applications to a separate drive will make fragmentation and free space easier to manage though.

There are often options in the BIOS to make this part of the boot process quicker. Depending on the PC, you may have options like “Quick Boot” or the option to disable the memory check. You can sometimes tell the BIOS specifically which type of drives you have, so it doesn’t have to detect them each time. You’ll have to keep these settings in mind when installing a new drive or troubleshooting drive related problems. These options will only decrease the boot time prior to Windows loading though, so if this isn’t a problem it’s best to leave it alone.

To make the Windows boot process quicker, there is a tool called ‘msconfig’ which you can access by going to Start then Run and typing ‘msconfig’. The main tab that is useful in there is the Startup tab. You can disable each startup item from here. A lot of applications put unnecessary items in here, so I’d check it after you install all of your applications. Some older applications might add things to your autoexec.bat and config.sys files, which you can view through msconfig also. These aren’t really required in Windows 98 unless you run a lot of DOS based applications. I would generally stay away from the win.ini and system.ini tabs. If you’re up for some experimentation though, and unticking something prevents Windows from booting properly, you can always go into safe mode and enable them again. Safe mode does not load any of items in msconfig.