Giving XP a kick in the bum
I have noticed the PVR booting slower and slower, taking a frustratingly long time to finish loading Media Portal. Today I decided to do something about it.
As sometimes getting the PVR on is an urgency, I will use a slightly expanded boot time frame. From power button to Media Portal menu being available it was 1 minute and 25 seconds. Miserable. It used to be around 40 seconds.
I knew some things I could change but I googled around for others and found advice about emptying the prefetch folder. C:\Windows\Prefetch. This basically caches programs you've opened before in hopes you might need them again. I had 104 files in there. Some multiple versions of programs. Clearly this was a major bottleneck to deal with at boot time. I deleted these files, gave the pvr a static ip (been meaning to for ages), deleted temp files, then rebooted. Instantly I had 30 seconds chopped off with a boot time of 55 seconds. Note that it took two reboots to see this change because the prefetch folder needed to be repopulated with stuff I actually use (a whole 5 files now). 55 seconds is good but I can do better.
Next up, disabling some services. Wireless and printer services are something I wont use on it so they can go. A few other odds and ends got disabled and it was time for another reboot.
(note, something just clunked over at the now off PVR, I hope everything is okay!)
Before completing this reboot, I dropped into the bios to clean up the boot order, just the main hard drive only. Getting back into Windows I had approximately 42 seconds. Much better and probably about the best I can do for now. I may do some more indepth research to better it but the main bugbear is off my back.
On another note, I am being encouraged to give MythTV another go - some preliminary research is still making me unsure. I can distract myself with optimising XP for now!
As sometimes getting the PVR on is an urgency, I will use a slightly expanded boot time frame. From power button to Media Portal menu being available it was 1 minute and 25 seconds. Miserable. It used to be around 40 seconds.
I knew some things I could change but I googled around for others and found advice about emptying the prefetch folder. C:\Windows\Prefetch. This basically caches programs you've opened before in hopes you might need them again. I had 104 files in there. Some multiple versions of programs. Clearly this was a major bottleneck to deal with at boot time. I deleted these files, gave the pvr a static ip (been meaning to for ages), deleted temp files, then rebooted. Instantly I had 30 seconds chopped off with a boot time of 55 seconds. Note that it took two reboots to see this change because the prefetch folder needed to be repopulated with stuff I actually use (a whole 5 files now). 55 seconds is good but I can do better.
Next up, disabling some services. Wireless and printer services are something I wont use on it so they can go. A few other odds and ends got disabled and it was time for another reboot.
(note, something just clunked over at the now off PVR, I hope everything is okay!)
Before completing this reboot, I dropped into the bios to clean up the boot order, just the main hard drive only. Getting back into Windows I had approximately 42 seconds. Much better and probably about the best I can do for now. I may do some more indepth research to better it but the main bugbear is off my back.
On another note, I am being encouraged to give MythTV another go - some preliminary research is still making me unsure. I can distract myself with optimising XP for now!
posted by I am huge in Japan at
9:08 am
3 Comments:
The Prefetch folder is not a Cache. Only one file is REFERENCED on Windows Boot and that is:
NTOSBOOT-B00DFAAD.PF
The rest are not even REFERENCED until you launch the associated application. It is IMPOSSIBLE for the other files to negatively effect boot up in ANY way. Cleaning the folder is NOT recommended and will SLOW DOWN your system. The folder is self cleaning at 128 entries.
I do not know if you ever ran any so called "tweaking" programs but there is a good chance something is broken with the prefetcher or your system never went idle, which is when the prefetching optimization runs.
You can fix the prefetcher to the default settings with this Prefetcher fix:
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/SupportCD/OptimizeXP.html#Tweaks
You can force the Prefetch optimization by running Bootvis or using this command from Run:
Rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks
The only other thing it could be is a corrupt prefetch NTOSBOOT-B00DFAAD.PF trace file. In which case something is really wrong with your machine or you are using the FAT file system.
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/SupportCD/XPMyths.html
By
Anonymous, at 8:11 pm
Nice burn!
Now to decide who to believe: the Internet page that helped you speed up your boot time by 30 seconds or the anonymous poster whose Internet page basically claims that what you did was blasphemy.
Maybe it's time to try MythTV after all...
By
Anonymous, at 9:11 pm
Thanks for your input 'Anonymous'.
I am aware that the prefetch folder is not a proper 'cache' but nonetheless it caches app launchers and causes them to be preloaded.
I am also aware that constantly deleting the contents of the file is not good for performance but I think the one time I did it giving me back 30 seconds of my life speaks for itself.
I think you may also be confusing my use of the term 'boot time'. As I wrote this is the time from power button being pressed to Windows auto-logging in and spawning the Media Portal program. Thus opening an application and using the prefetch folder.
By
I am huge in Japan, at 8:35 am
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