From two minutes and twenty seven seconds to nineteen seconds: A Boot Time Odyssey
It got cold early here this year and I spent a couple of days inside playing with the computer, my internet connection got cut off for almost a full day so I had a lot of free time I would normally spend online figuring out ways to speed up my more-sluggish-than-it-should-be computer.
So I have a Dell Optiplex 755 with Quad core processor at 2.66 Ghz, 8 GB of RAM, a 1 GB PCIe x16 video card and a 160 GB SATA HD, not top of the line by today's standards but for surfing the web and playing video, home theater type stuff, maybe run Flight Simulator or rFactor a bit and do some image and video editing it's more than adequate when it's running right.
The computer had been getting really sluggish, a two minute and twenty seven second boot up (remember Win 7 Ultimate 64 bit=big), I have a tendency to try out a lot of new software and I get slack on doing a backup before, lazy, forget, in a hurry or what have you and what at one time felt like a pretty snappy computer had become really slow, uninstalling things was a hit or miss proposition, sometimes it would speed things up and other times it would slow them down.
When I first got the computer it came with the OS loaded but no install discs so I immediately made a backup image of the OS drive and carefully archived it. Rummaging through a few junk computers in the storage shed I found another 160 GB SATA drive and I installed that and restored the backup copy of my original OS disc to it. Somewhere along the line I have found a nice little utility package called Glary Utilities 5 that when it is installed includes a routine that automatically measures boot time. Glary Utilities tells me that with a fresh install on this 160 GB disc boot up takes one minute and two seconds. That's quite a difference and the computer feels at least that much faster in use as well.
But that's not the end of it, since I had a fresh copy on a HD and a confirmed backup I thought I'd play with things a bit to see if I could speed the system up even more. Glary Utilities has a defragmenter with an optimizing option that moves older files and larger files to the end of the hard drive which speeds up loading the OS for reasons I'm not entirely clear on. It also has a boot time defragmenter that will defragment the portions of your drive it is not safe to defrag while Windows is running.
After playing around with all this for about four or five hours including figuring out what tools to use and rebooting the computer a bunch of times I got my system down to thirty seven second boot as reported by Glary and it felt even quicker than it did with the fresh install before optimization.
Now this is with the 160 GB drive which is older technology and kind of slow. I also have a 500 GB Seagate Barracuda drive that's somewhat newer tech and quicker so I used EaseUS free Partition Master software to migrate the OS on the 160 GB to the 500 GB drive. After the migration and a little more cleaning up with the defrag option the very same computer that took two minutes and twenty seven seconds to boot now takes twenty nine seconds to boot the same OS, Windows 7 Ultimate.
I wrote the above a couple of weeks ago and was going to post it then but at that point I had already ordered a hardware speed-up option that had not arrived, a 32 GB Sandisk ReadyCache SSD and I decided to wait and see what that did for my system before I put it up. So anyway, with the Sandisk installed and the dedicated and proprietary to Sandisk ExpressCache software downloaded and installed my boot time is now down to nineteen seconds, that's over seven times faster than when I started.
Not only does the OS boot quicker, everything feels dramatically faster, websites that crawled on the screen before now practically snap up and programs that took an interminable wait are now there in a just a few seconds, my computer feels significantly better than when I got it.
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But I thought my tale was a dramatic example of how tweaking your computer can make a large difference in your user experience without necessarily spending a lot of money.
My SATA is only 3GB/sec on the motherboard so it's only gonna get so fast..
One of the things I do that eats up drive space and can load the computer down is stacking astronomical images I take with my DSLR, some of mine have been two and three hundred ten megapixel images in RAW format to stack into a single one. That's about the only time the big case fan under the front cover of my box cranks up to the point you can really notice it.
I'll be interested to see how the various astronomical imaging programs I use run now I have the computer tweaked. I have Stellarium in as a Planetarium program and it all but blinks onto the screen now but I haven't installed any serious imaging programs like Iris, Astrostack or Deep Sky Stacker yet. The programs themselves aren't that big but they really massage a lot of data in some fairly intricate ways.
