Boot a little bit faster with Windows 7

It’s nothing new, but thought I’d mention it for those who are not aware of it.

When booting Windows 7, or Vista, it will only use one cpu or core when executing the programs during the boot process. It might not help you at all, but if a lot of services etc are started upon boot, it might improve your boot time a little bit.

1. Click on: [Start] (Round windows button on your taskbar)
2. Type in: msconfig
3. Hit: [Enter]
4. Click on the tab: Boot
5. Click: Advanced options…
6. Check: Number of processors
7. Select the number for your machine, 2 in my case as I have a dual core, without hyper-threading.
8. Click on: [OK]

That’s it, it will now utilize more of your cpu during boot.

Going the SDD route

(Before and after benchmarks are at the bottom of the post)

[Edit] I’m no longer using the Intel AHCI drivers as they don’t support TRIM

After working with installing new VM’s on my Latitude E6400 where the programs to be installed were iso’s mounted on the same physical drive I decided to go the SSD route. That way I would not only end up with a blazing fast drive, but with two drives. My mind was set and the journey began.

After some research I decided on the OCZ Vertex 256gb drive. I long debated with myself to get an Intel X-25M 160gb, but the size of the OCZ won me over. I should still be able to experience the wow factor of an SSD.

Together with the drive I ordered an Icy Box SATA dock in order to clone the drive over eSATA which I can use afterwards for the old drive (a 250gb WD Scorpio).

Before I go into all the issues I encountered, I recommend non-geeks to do a clean install. It’s most likely faster (unless you know all the steps before hand) and will spare you a lot of grief. Personally I prefer a challenge as it involves learning.

These are the steps I did in order for it to work.

1. Disabled bitlocker on the drive
2. Followed this post on how to change SATA mode from IRRT to AHCI, as IRRT didn’t seem to work for the OCZ (I ended up with a blinking cursor and freeze during boot). The guide works for Windows 7 as well, but I downloaded the latest Intel drivers instead, v8.9. No reason to run on old drivers.
3. Downloaded g4l to clone the drive (Acronis True Image 2010 failed to convert my Windows 7 partition) which I put on a USB stick with UNetbootin.
4. Plugged the OCZ in the Icy dock and booted up g4l. (F12 brings up a boot menu on the Dell which lets you choose boot device)
5. At the shell prompt I ran:
   dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=1M
   This ran for approx. 74 minutes with average transfer of 56,5mb/s.
6. Next I switched out the old drive with the new and booted where I left off.
7. Once I had started I followed the “SSD Windows 7 Tweaks” guide on how to optimize Windows 7 on SSD’s.

I started venturing on a path for partition alignment, but the only misaligned partition on the Dell layout is the Dell recovery partition which I never use. The Recover and Data partitions both are aligned just fine for a 64 sector offset.

Benchmarks

Action	Before (seconds)	After (seconds)
Startup	33 login box 130 Live Mesh	25 login box 60 Live Mesh
Shutdown	25	18
Hibernate	41	29
Resume	27	27

Live Mesh means when all is loaded and Live Mesh login box pops up.

I gained most on startup, as this is a lot of random reads/writes when loading all the programs. But the general snappiness of the OS is much much better. All in all, absolutely worth the upgrade.

My Windows 7 disk mark went up from 5.6 to 7.2 (where 7.9 is max).

The disk came with firmware version 1.4.

Windows 7 beta - issues

Here's my first comments and experiences with Windows 7.

I downloaded Windows 7 this weekend and did an upgrade of a 32bit Vista sp1 laptop. The upgrade itself took 4 hours which is ok since I have a lot of stuff installed. The system itself behaves much more snappy than Vista. Startup and shutdown is quicker, hibernation is quicker, basically the OS response time is much better.

Issues which I had after the upgrade:

• Only one cpu core was working. This was due to incorrect ACPI driver being used. Resolution was to disable multi core in the bios and let Windows redetect the cpu. Then shutdown and enable the second core again. This made Windows enable both cores.
• Daemon tools is not working (SPTD driver)
• Had to do a repair install on Acrobat Reader 9 and Java in order for them to work in IE 8
• My built-in Broadcom network card is not working properly (BCM5906M) It won't access the LAN at work and get an IP address. Have to debug a bit more to find out more about the issue.
• Toshiba bluetooth device is not working properly. Vista drivers won't work and Windows built-in driver are just as crap as Vista. Meaning basically not supporting much at all.

I'll report more issues when they appear, but for now I give two thumbs up for this release!