[What I wrote here is wrong. Please read this follow-up article.]
Here is a very simple way to reduce the time it takes to boot Windows 7 by around 20% (the exact number depends on the hardware).
I would never have thought the effect to be this drastic, but the simple graphical animation Windows 7 displays while booting to the logon screen slows down the startup process by several seconds! By disabling this effect we gain roughly 20% in boot speed. There are two ways to configure this.
Using a GUI
Run MSConfig.exe and check the box in front of “No GUI boot”:
From the Command Line
Issue the following command in an elevated command prompt:
bcdedit /set quietboot on
Caveats
I am not aware of any downsides of disabling the boot animation, except that the screen stays black while booting.
If you use BitLocker, make sure to suspend it prior to changing boot settings. You can resume it after the reboot. If you forget this, you will be prompted to enter your BitLocker recovery key each time the system starts up.
This setting has no effect on Windows Server 2008 R2, by the way.
This will probably have a nice effect on VDI environments too!
We also did some testing on how to speed up the boot time and found even if you only switch to the basic boot animation which also is used in Windows Server 2008 R2 you shorten your boot time by about 6 seconds. In our test we also found that there is no measurable time difference between the disabled and basic boot animation.
To switch to the basic boot animation: bcdedit /set bootux basic
To disable the boot animation: bcdedit /set bootux disabled
The basic boot animation is a bit more handy as you still see some progress.
Thanks for sharing, Tim!
sorry, but this is hoax.It speeds up nothing. xbootmgr confirms this. So if Windwos boot slowly analyze it with xbootmgr from the Windows Performance toolkit.
No, it is not. I did not bother with tools that measure from the inside, but took my measurements from the outside, with a simple stopwatch. And that shows that boot time is reduced.
What you see was the effect of ReadyBoot (not boost!). This is the boot prefetcher from Vista/7. Windows learns from older boots and now you see an improvement and think it is caused by your “tweak”.
Thank you! I re-tested and, obviously, you are right. It would have been too simple… I wrote a follow-up article explaining my mistake here: http://helgeklein.com/blog/2012/02/what-remains-of-magic-speed-improvements/