Accelerate the start of the Win XP operating system

There is such a widely circulated Windows XP optimization technique:

Reduce the number of laps in the Windows XP progress bar and increase the system startup speed. This can be achieved by changing the key value of EnablePrefetcher to "1" under the "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SYSTEM\\CurrentControlSet\\Control\\SessionManager\\Memory Management\\PrefetchParameters" branch in the registry. This can reduce the number of pre-read files and reduce the wait time of the progress bar. The effect is that the progress bar runs into the login screen after one lap.

Hands-on practice:

According to this technique, I set the value of EnablePrefetcher to 0, 1, 2, 3, and measure the settings from the POST screen to the computer. The time when the welcome screen appears. The result of multiple statistics is that the time difference in these four cases is almost negligible. In this startup process, although the number of scrolling of the scroll bar is significantly lower than before the unmodified, the black screen time between the appearance of the screen and the welcome screen is increased a lot, so the total time measured is almost equal. At this point, the author has to question the optimization method. In fact, there are two questions worthy of questioning.

Question 1: Reduce the number of pre-read files to shorten the system startup time?

The key value of the EnablePrefetcher key in the registry can be set to the following values. The meanings are:

"0" - cancel the pre-read function;

"1" - the system will only pre-read the application;

"2 "- The system will only pre-read Windows system files;

"3" - the system will pre-read Windows system files and applications (Windows XP defaults).

The results of the trial have shown that the system startup time has not decreased significantly after the value has been modified. This means that reducing the number of prefetched files is not a major factor in optimizing system startup time.

Question 2: The reduction in the number of progress bars means that the system startup time is shortened?

After modifying the registry, we only see the waiting time of the progress bar (ie the number of laps rolled) Reduced, but practice shows that this is just the illusion of the surface. Then why is the system startup time still not significantly reduced? This requires understanding the system startup process.

System startup optimization focus: see the whole process of computer startup

To speed up the startup time of the system, the most important thing is to optimize the startup process of the computer. Let's first take a look at what happens when the computer starts up.

After the computer is powered on, the first step is to perform a power-on self-test, that is, POST (Power On Self Test), check the RAM, the drive, etc.; the second step will read the active partition master boot record. The boot loader of the third step starts the loader initialization and the operating system starts officially. This process is mainly divided into four stages: the boot phase, the load kernel phase, the initialization kernel phase, and the login system startup. The initialization of the kernel phase is a very complicated process. The system needs to load many drivers of the underlying hardware, read the registration information, find new hardware devices, start related services, initialize the display device and display the user interface. And implement various user-defined configurations, such as security configuration.

Looking back at the technique mentioned earlier, changing from the default to pre-read only does reduce the number of pre-read files. However, Windows XP startup is still a very complicated process. Simply modifying the number of pre-read files does not effectively achieve the purpose of optimizing system startup.

As the number of programs and files in the system increases, it is normal for the system to slow down. To significantly optimize the system startup process, you mainly need to adjust the hardware startup options, reduce the system to detect hardware time, regularly defragment the disk, reduce unnecessary self-starting programs in the system, and so on.