Computer

You think your PC boots up too fast, but could it boot up even faster?

Since the beginning of modern computing, and especially in the last few years, the performance of PCs and laptops has increased almost exponentially. They work faster and faster in all kinds of tasks, whether it is to play games or to carry out any type of calculation, but their starting speed It seems to be still a pending issue. has it been reached limit how fast you can boot a pc?

Thanks to the great improvements in processors, RAM memory, and especially in storage devices with SSDs, the speed at which any PC executes any type of task has been significantly improved; For example, if just opening Word took 10 seconds on a PC 10 years ago, on a modern PC with NVMe SSD it can take just a couple of seconds. However, what about the boot sequence? Does it take less now than 10 years ago?

Your PC is not that fast because of the boot sequence

A lot of things happen during PC startup, especially checks (and a lot of it is what we know as POST). During this process, the PC hardware runs self-diagnostic tasks to check that everything is correct and, once this process is finished, it proceeds to load the operating system. Therefore, we could say that how long the PC takes to boot is influenced by the speed of the SSD when it comes to start operating systemsuch as the time it takes for the motherboard and hardware components to perform their self diagnostic tasks.

POST

In recent years, the time it takes for PCs to start the operating system has improved significantly, and not because this process has been optimized (rather the other way around), but because storage devices have substantially improved their performance and that It has allowed us to reduce loading times a lot.

I personally remember, at the dawn of modern computing when I started out, how long it took my 66 MHz 486 DX2 to start Windows 95, with a mere 20 GB IDE hard drive that could easily take a couple of minutes to allow me to interact. with the PC. Now everything is much faster, and actually from the time you press the power button on the box until the Windows desktop is displayed and you can interact with it, it only takes a few seconds.

However, in the times in which we live, those 20-25 seconds that the computer takes to boot up may seem like too much, and that the loading part of the operating system may only take 5 seconds. As we said, this is due to the diagnostic process and checks carried out by the computer’s hardware, a process that, although it has improved and takes less time than in PCs of years ago, continues to be a drag in terms of how fast it can be. can boot the PC (ignore the time it takes for computers to return from sleep or hibernation here, since POST is not performed on these).

Has the limit been reached?

For now, it seems that way, although there are some “tricks” that can help you reduce the time your PC takes to perform those initial checks. Of course, everything will depend on your needs, since these tricks consist of telling the PC not to perform certain checks or to skip some things in the startup sequence. Therefore, be very careful if you perform any of the actions that we are going to list below, since you will be “playing with the BIOS”. Do it at your own risk.

post delay

Note: keep in mind that the names of the options that we are going to discuss differ depending on the manufacturer and model of the motherboard.

  • To begin with, under the BOOT tab in the BIOS there should be a section called “Post delay time” or similar. Reduce it to the minimum number that allows you (usually 1 second).
  • In “Boot options” there are usually several options. Here we tell the BIOS the order of devices to “look” in to find the operating system and boot from it. If you only have one storage device, turn off ALL options except for that device so it won’t search all the others.
  • If you only have SATA / PCIe NVMe devices, disable the IDE controllers so the board doesn’t check them and save time.
  • If you have no devices in RAID, disable RAID controller checking as well.
  • Same with the 1394 controller.
  • If you have boot from LAN enabled, disable it. This option is often the cause of long POST delays.

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