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zinnias in space,
their grace in the shadow of
clandestine arms' race
[^]
«Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.» Benjamin Franklin
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Ever since I converted my Dell desktop to UEFI boot, I have been fiddling with the BIOS settings to see how I can speed up my boot time. For the purposes of this discussion, I define "boot time" as the time lapse between pressing the power button and the log-in screen appearing.
My apologies for a shameless plug: You can read more about my UEFI exploits in this CP article: (Take careful note of the warnings in this article!)
Preparing a Drive for UEFI Boot[^]
UEFI is supposed to boot faster than legacy boot, but I was disappointed because my boot time hovered around 38 seconds. That was until I noticed in my BIOS that I had the Legacy Boot ROMs enabled. There was a note from Dell that enabling these ROMs will cause them to load at boot time. This unnecessary load must take a few seconds, because when I disabled the legacy ROMs, the boot time dropped to 19 seconds. Wow! I have never had a machine boot this fast. This setup is really smoking. By the way: My Dell is a 64 bit machine with a 3.41GHz processor and DDR4 memory, running Windows 10 Pro.
Note that this comment applies to Dell desktops. I do not know if legacy ROMs can be disabled in other machines.
How do we preserve the wisdom men will need,
when their violent passions are spent?
- The Lost Horizon
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Is your system drive an SSD? Mine is and my year old system (Gigabyte Brix i7, 16G RAM, 500GB SSD, Win7) boots in about 5-7 seconds.
/ravi
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Yes, I have a Samsung SSD. Does your system boot in 5-7 seconds from the moment you press the power button?
How do we preserve the wisdom men will need,
when their violent passions are spent?
- The Lost Horizon
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Well, I have 32GB of memory. I wonder if the BIOS is doing some kind of memory check at boot time, that may take a few seconds. However, there is no way I am removing memory from my machine, just to speed up the boot process!
How do we preserve the wisdom men will need,
when their violent passions are spent?
- The Lost Horizon
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Perhaps it's doing an exhaustive RAM test? If my foggy memory (no pun intended) serves me right, I think there's an option that toggles between a cursory and full RAM check. I think it used to be called "Quick Boot".
/ravi
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I will check my BIOS for a "quick boot" option.
How do we preserve the wisdom men will need,
when their violent passions are spent?
- The Lost Horizon
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Cornelius Henning wrote: Does your system boot in 5-7 seconds from the moment you press the power button?
Mine too. SSD drive, Dell Precision M3800 laptop, 16 GB RAM.
Marc
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Ok, Let's compare apples with apples. I tried my Dell Inspiron laptop and the boot time is 7 seconds. However, my desktop is still checking out disk drives at 7 seconds. (I have two internal drives and two external drives connected.) That may explain the longer boot time for the desktop?
How do we preserve the wisdom men will need,
when their violent passions are spent?
- The Lost Horizon
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That's probably it. I have no external drives connected at boot time.
/ravi
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Cornelius Henning wrote: my desktop is still checking out disk drives at 7 seconds
I vaguely remember one of my machine having options in the BIOS to either automatically detect all drives on every boot, or set them up once permanently and skip any subsequent attempt to auto-detect drives. I think that had saved me a few seconds on every boot.
The drawback of course was that if I ever changed or added drives, I had to remember to go back in the BIOS to update things. YMMV.
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Cornelius Henning wrote: That may explain the longer boot time for the desktop?
Sounds reasonable. 
Marc
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On my Win10 machine the booting is vastly faster if the external USB drives are not connected.
My long term goal is to live forever. So far, so good...
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With AHCI enabled? The AHCI scanning is where my system spends a good portion of its boot time.
If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't. — Lyall Watson
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You cannot explicitly enable AHCI on my Dell when you are booting UEFI? I believe UEFI includes AHCI by default, but I am not sure.
How do we preserve the wisdom men will need,
when their violent passions are spent?
- The Lost Horizon
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AHCI is indeed, independent of UEFI or legacy BIOS, and it may be turned on or off, depending on your model...
Skipper: We'll fix it.
Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this?
Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
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Ok, I have three options in my BIOS:
SATA off
SATA set to AHCI
SATA set to RAID
Only the RAID setting works, the machine will not boot on any other option. (Although I have NO RAID disks!)
I may have had SATA set to RAID when I installed Windows 10? Dell BIOS tells me I have to re-install the OS if I change this setting! Aaargh!
How do we preserve the wisdom men will need,
when their violent passions are spent?
- The Lost Horizon
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Basically it is not a problem that the BIOS configured to RAID as long as it does not holds the startup back...
There is away to move from RAID to AHCI, but it involves registry edit...In any case, and at your own risk...
Set these two values to 0, then restart the computer...Go directly to BIOS and set AHCI
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\msahci\Start
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\atapi\Start
It worked for a Dell E6510...
Skipper: We'll fix it.
Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this?
Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
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Thanks for your valuable inputs, but I have already re-installed the OS with AHCI enabled and RAID disabled! It's no big deal, once you have done a re-install a number of times, as I have.
How do we preserve the wisdom men will need,
when their violent passions are spent?
- The Lost Horizon
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19 seconds is a loooooooong time...
I have 64GB and it is up in 5-6 seconds (and wakes from sleeping in 3-4)...
See if there is:
1. A memory check during boot - turn it off
2. There is a waiting for different types of boot (like network/DVD/USB) that fails but wastes time - reorder it
3. You may have a options display with those F-keys to enter different configuration options, it's too waste time - you can turn it off too
4. If you have RAID and the the summary page turned off it will wait for and other 2-3 seconds you to respond - turn it off too
Skipper: We'll fix it.
Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this?
Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
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I have never understood the fascination with boot times. At my company, and at just about every company I have worked, no one EVER turns off their PC. I do the same at home. The 3 PC's, server, and laptop I own are always on.
In the event I need to reboot, I go grab a cup of coffee and come back in to a log in screen.
So what?
[ADDITION]
What about AFTER boot/login? On a typical dev machine there are countless apps that need to start up before you can become productive. So your boot time of +/-19 seconds to the login screen really isn't a good measure of when you're "up & running"... IMHO.
If it's not broken, fix it until it is
modified 18-Jan-16 12:20pm.
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You are right, there are a few services that have to load after the log in screen, but you can use the machine while they load. In my case, I have about 20% of the services that want to load, disabled, since I do not need them.
How do we preserve the wisdom men will need,
when their violent passions are spent?
- The Lost Horizon
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Right.
In my world I have to open
- Visual Studio
- SQL Server Mgmt Studio
- IE or Chrome
- Services
- IIS
- Email Client
- Skype
- Sometimes Documents (when needed)
- Other lesser needed apps.
Some of the apps take FOREVER to load, so like I said, just getting to the log in screen doesn't mean you're ready to work.
If it's not broken, fix it until it is
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IIRC, I used to have a boot time less than 5 seconds on my 64... kB Commodore 64.
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