Tutorial: Boot Vista 60+ seconds faster ! (Level: Beginner)

I donno if this has been posted before, but this will be very helpful for those who dont know. So you have your own Vista PC or a laptop which indirectly means you most probably have a multi-core CPU. Read further only if you have more than one core in your CPU because everything that follows now is largely based on the number of cores. Windows Vista has gone way notorious when it comes to system requirements and it has been criticized all over as it hogs much of the hardware resources. And when it comes to booting, it really takes up considerable amount of time. To tell a fact, Vista does not actually take the full advantage of the hardware it has been provided. In the booting process, it only uses one core out of your multicore CPU. Now this is something really ridiculous. All thanks to Microsoft!

Anyways, you can tweak around a little bit and make Vista boot faster by making it use all the cores during the booting process. Follow the steps below.

1) Start --> Run --> msconfig. This will open the Configuration window.
2) In the Boot tab, click 'Advanced Options...' button.
3) CHECK mark 'Number of Processors' option and select the number of processors you want to use during the booting process.
4) Click OK and click OK again. Restart your system.

You will experience great change in the time taken during the boot process. If you want to check the difference between the booting times before and after this tweak, you can use the Boot Speed utility which can be downloaded here.

Following are my screenshots before and after applying this tweak.

BEFORE:
*img213.imageshack.us/img213/7642/reboot1nd9.png

AFTER:
*img385.imageshack.us/img385/4240/reboot2sh1.png


source: winmatrix.com