Hardware factors that affect the startup speed Through practice, the author found that the main accessories that affect the startup speed of the computer are the motherboard and hard disk, which have little to do with the CPU. That is to say, other things being equal, the startup speed of the expensive Pentium 4 computer is the same as that of the cheap Celeron 4. Motherboard is the "base" of all kinds of computer accessories. There are many tasks to be done when starting up, such as self-checking, searching for various ports and various external devices. Therefore, the startup speed can be improved by reducing self-checking time, reducing external equipment and improving efficiency. If the computer is connected with peripherals such as scanner and USB hard disk, it may slow down the startup speed of the system. It is recommended that you connect these peripherals only when necessary. You can connect USB devices after startup. If the network card is not set properly, it will obviously slow down the system startup speed. If your computer doesn't need a network card, unplug the PCI network card directly, and the integrated network card can be shielded by BIOS to avoid affecting the startup speed. Many motherboards detect integrated network cards much faster than stand-alone network cards, which is one of the reasons why some computers "fake their death" after being turned on and it takes more than one minute to surf the Internet normally. The main factor that determines the performance of the motherboard is the motherboard chipset, and the main factor that determines the startup speed is the disk performance and driving performance of the motherboard chipset. At present, the main brands of motherboard chipset are Intel, SiS, VIA, ATi and nVIDIA, and Intel and SiS have the best disk performance. Everyone knows that Intel is an IT giant. Occupy more than 60% market share of motherboard chipset. However, SiS is not well-known, and the market share of motherboard chipset is less than 10%, which may be related to insufficient publicity. But on the AMD platform, its disk performance is the best and the price is the cheapest. In order to reduce the self-test time, some motherboard manufacturers will make some special designs, which can shorten the BIOS self-test time to 5 seconds at most. We can choose different motherboard manufacturers according to our own needs, instead of blindly following the recommendation of dealers. In addition to POST, the computer startup time is mainly used to read system files from the hard disk. The job of a hard disk is to read and write data on a high-speed rotating disk by moving the magnetic head (Figure 1). Then the higher the disk speed, the more data the head reads in a unit time, which is very beneficial to system startup. In addition, the hard disk with fast seek time and large cache can also significantly improve the startup time. Buyers with abundant funds or DIY people can consider Western Digital's "Raptor" series hard drives, and ordinary users with tight funds can choose Hitachi cache hard drives that often win performance awards. Computer is a high-tech product with both software and hardware, and accessory setting and system optimization are also indispensable weapons for starting and speeding up. Second, the setting and optimization of accessories 1. The BIOS optimization setting of the motherboard turns off redundant IDE channels, USB devices and other hardware, which can be shielded with "None". Use IDE Hard Disk Auto-Detection to automatically detect hard disks. No memory detection, open all caches, enter Advanced CMOS Settings, and set "Quick Start" to "Enable", so that the memory above 1MB will not be detected. "ide0master/slavepio/DMA mode, ide 1master/slavepio/DMA mode" hard disk sequence (mode) is all set to "automatic". Enter the "Advanced BIOS Function" option, move the cursor to the "First Boot Device" option, and select "HDD-0" to boot directly from the hard disk, which takes several seconds. Move the cursor to Quick POST and set it to Enabled. Set to "Disabled" for "Start floppy disk search". It is suggested that the memory bank with good memory quality should be set to "2" in the "SDRAM CAS Latency" option. Tip: The English name of the setting with the same effect may be different in different motherboard BIOS. 2。 Network card settings When entering the operating system, the system will search the IP address of the network card. If the IP address of the network card is set to automatically obtain, the system will search the DHCP server in the network to obtain the IP address, which invisibly prolongs the startup time. If it is not necessary, it is best to specify the IP address of the network card (especially the client in the LAN, Figure 2). 3. Turn on the DMA transfer mode of the hard disk. Right-click "My Computer → Properties → Hardware → Device Manager →IDE ATA/ATAPI Controller → Find the IDE channel where the hard disk is located → Properties → Advanced Settings" on the desktop to open the DMA transfer mode of the hard disk, so as to speed up data reading and writing (Figure 3). The settings of Win98 and WinME are basically the same, just check the DMA option. 4. Slimming BIOS ROM There are some files in the motherboard BIOS ROM that we can't use, and we can delete them with BIOS editing tools such as CBROM and AwardFlash. Note: this is a dangerous operation, and novices had better not move. Third, Windows system optimization 1. It is an effective method to remove redundant self-starting programs. Click Start → Run, enter msconfig in the dialog box that appears, and then click OK to bring up the system configuration utility (only for Win98 and WinXP systems, Win2000 users need to copy MSCONFIG.EXE into the system folder to use or use the registry editing method described later). Click the "Start" tab and remove the "√" in front of the program that does not need to be started automatically. Generally, you only need to leave ctfmon (input method icon), system tray (volume icon) and antivirus program. Only "ctfmon" is left in the author's computer (Figure 4), which can shorten the startup time by about 10 second. 2. Optimize the system properties of the component (Win98/WinME) Right-click my computer, select Properties → Performance → File System, select floppy disk, and remove "Search for a new floppy disk drive every time you start the computer"; Select "hard disk", change "main purpose" to "network server", and adjust "read ahead optimization" to full speed (Figure 5); Select "CD-ROM", adjust the cache to the maximum, and select "Four times or higher speed". 3. Modify IDE channel control (WinXP) Right-click My Computer → Properties → Hardware → Device Manager → Expand IDE ATA/ATAP controller, double-click the auxiliary IDE channel option, and select the Advanced Settings tab in the pop-up dialog box. In device 0 and device 1, the modification method of "main IDE channel" is the same under the device type. After restarting, the scrolling time of the scroll bar will be significantly reduced. 4. Using BootVis software to improve the startup speed BootVis (download address: www.skycn.com/soft/7766.html) is a startup acceleration software specially developed by Microsoft for WinXP, which is safe to use and can obviously improve the startup speed. Due to space reasons, the specific usage will not be introduced here. Interested friends can check the help file. 5. Remove the gorgeous and bloated appearance, remove the "wallpaper" and "screen saver", and delete the redundant desktop icons. If it is WinXP, you can also right-click my computer, select Properties → Advanced, click Settings in the performance item, and select Adjust to Best Performance (Figure 7). After the above settings and optimization, the startup time of WinXP is generally the same.