Feb
27

Tweaks to boot your Windows XP much faster.

Hello mates. Here’s a little tweak I came across while playing with my home computer. I did a bit of research and found that 6 in 10 friends still run Windows XP on their computers. Of this 60%, 75% have a very slow machine in terms of boot-up.

This tweak will only apply to those who only have a single hard drive on their primary IDE channel. This probably locks out peeps with Serial ata (SATA) drives (not confirmed yet). Make sure there’s nothing else on device 0 or 1 and all other ROMs are connected on the secondary IDE channel.

Each time you boot XP, there’s an updated file called NTOSBOOT-*.pf which appears in prefetch folder directory. Fortunately, there’s no need to erase any other files as this new prefetch in XP significantly improves loading time of installed programs. This solution is meant to force XP to boot faster and not compromise on performance.

Open notepad.exe, type “del C:windowsprefetch tosboot-*.* /q” (without the quotes of-course) & save as “ntosboot.bat” in C drive or the specific drive where your Operating system is installed.
From the Start menu, select “Run” & type “gpedit.msc“. This is the Group policy editor.
Double click “Windows Settings” under “Computer Configuration” and double click again on “Shutdown” in the right window.
In the new window, click “add“, “Browse“; locate your “ntosboot.bat” file & click “Open“.
Click “OK“, “Apply” & “OK” once again to exit.
From the Start menu, select “Run” & type “devmgmt.msc“.
Double click on “IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers“
Right click on “Primary IDE Channel” and select “Properties“.
Select the “Advanced Settings” tab then on the device 0 or 1 that doesn’t have ‘device type’ grayed out select ‘none‘ instead of ‘autodetect‘ & click “OK“.
Right click on “Secondary IDE channel“, select “Properties” and repeat exactly what you did in Step 9.
Reboot computer.