85. Change boot sequence.

An easy and effective way of speeding up your loading time is to change the boot sequence in the BIOS. By altering this sequence so that your system hard drive is the first device the computer attempts to boot from, you save the precious seconds needed for the computer to check other devices for bootable media. If you wish to boot the system from a CD or floppy, you will need to change the order in the BIOS again, however.

Some BIOS versions include a menu that can be accessed from the POST which allows the user to choose the device he or she wishes to boot from. To do this, go to the 'advanced BIOS features' section of the BIOS and change the 'first boot device' setting to 'hard disk 0.'

86. Disable the XP loading screen

To speed up your boot process slightly, disable the Windows XP loading screen. This can be accomplished easily by opening the MSCONFIG utility ('start\run and type msconfig'), selecting the 'boot.ini' tab and checking the /NOGUIBOOT option.

When you boot your system, you will see a black screen in between POST and the welcome screen from now on.

87. Eliminate unwanted fonts to increase boot speed

The Windows XP control panel contains a 'fonts' directory which holds all the fonts currently installed on your system. These can come from Windows itself or from an application such as Word.

Windows checks and loads these fonts during the startup process, therefore having a large amount of font files can cause performance to drag during startup. The simple solution for this (if you do not expect to use the majority of these fonts constantly) is to move the unnecessary fonts to a new directory elsewhere on the hard disk, preserving them in case they are needed, but preventing them from loading upon startup.

To do this:

Create a new directory called 'font backup' or something similar on your c: drive.

Go to 'start\control panel\fonts' and select all fonts (for now, we will be more selective later). Drag and drop all the fonts into the backup folder you just created. Things will get garbled for a moment, never fear. Windows XP will automatically re-install the base fonts that it needs to display text into the fonts folder in a second or two.

Now you have the bare minimum of fonts installed. Go through the backup folder and cherry pick the fonts that you are sure to use (like Times New Roman or Arial).

If you removed a large volume of fonts, your system should now boot faster.

88. Turn off BIOS disk detection

Most modern motherboards will attempt to detect any IDE devices, such as hard drives and CD drives, during the POST sequence each time the computer boots. By configuring the BIOS with the correct drive information, you can shave a few seconds off your boot time by avoiding this detection process.

To do this enter your system's BIOS setup screen.

Depending on your motherboard, you may have an IDE drive auto-detection menu. If you do, simply select it to automatically set your drives. If not, configure the drives through the 'standard CMOS settings' menu.

Note that some motherboard chipsets (like Nvidia's Nforce 2) do not allow this auto-detection to be disabled.