PC/Laptop Boot Time Optimization

Apart from Symantec products and processes, why can not we have ideas that can change the way we do things.

I have got an idea here that is going to save lot of time and money for our organization.

According to Microsoft the design goals for Windows XP on a typical consumer PC are:

• Boot to a useable state in a total of 30 seconds
• Resume from Hibernate (S4) in a total of 20 seconds
• Resume from Standby (S3) in a total of 5 seconds

I work for an organization which has over 1000 employees. Most of the employees are complaining about the time that a laptop/desktop is taking to boot to Windows. We are also concerned on the same. We had a meeting today and discussed about the new and ongoing issues in our company that are affecting the business. One of our discussion topics is, how to bring down the bootime and how to increase the performance?

We have a standard Environment:

• Laptop/Desktop [Dell/HP]:
• 2GB Memory
• 120GB HDD
• Intel Core2 Duo Processor / AMD Athlon X2 Dula Core
• DVD ROM

I did some initial testing on some test machines and found that there are some startup entries [applications/services]. The common entries that can be found on all the machines are:

• Altiris Agent
• Quick time
• Anti-virus [Norton]
• communicator
• Adobe Reader

Members of our team came up with lot of solutions and here are some of them:

1. Removed unwanted startup entries and disable unwanted services
   Start > Run and type "msconfig"
   Start > Run and type "services.msc"
2. Defragment on regular intervals
   defrag volume [-a] [-f][-v] [-?]
3. Keep System Restore turned off
4. Disable disk indexing

We are in the process of automating the above tasks so that we can implement the same in our organization and thus bring down the boot time and increase the performance of the PC/Laptop. This saves lot of time and money for the organization.

I hereby welcome your thoughts/suggestions/additions which can help all of us.