Optimizing your Windows PC

Removing the Windows wait time

Here's a simple way to shave a few seconds off the time Windows takes to start up.

Have you ever noticed the messages:

Starting Windows 95... or
Starting Windows 98...

when you turn on your computer? What Windows is actually doing is waiting to see if you're going to press F8 or F4 to halt the Windows startup. If you were to press one of those keys when the message is being displayed, you would be brought to either the command prompt, or an option menu.

However if you're never going to halt the Windows startup, you might as well just disable this feature, and save a few seconds every time you turn on your computer. Here's how:

Through either My Computer, or the Windows Explorer, navigate the the root directory of your c drive. Make sure you have the ability to see hidden files (go in the View>Folder Options menu to turn on displaying of hidden folders is you haven't done so already), and locate the file intitled msdos.sys.

Right click on that file, and select Properties. Un check the read-only and hidden properties. Now open the file in notepad.

In the [Options] section of the file, you should see a line that says
BootMulti = (something)

modify it so that it reads
BootMulti = 0

Now save the file, and change the properties of it back to hidden and read-only.

From now on you will never see the Starting Windows 95... message or the wait time associated with it.

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Preventing Windows from resizing the swap file
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