Factors Affecting the Boot-up Time

Raymond Poon

Some staff wonder why their machines take so long to boot-up while others wonder whether the boot-up time can be improved if their machines are upgraded. The following will provide answers to these questions:

• Boot-up time, whether booting from network or from local hard disk, is sensitive to the number of peripherals as well as the number of application software installed especially when they are defined in the Startup Folder to be brought up automatically during boot-up.
• Network boot-up time is sensitive to the network traffic.
  
• Client hardware configuration definitely affects the boot-up time. The boot-up time for Pentium II 233 is 1/3 of that for the 486-33. It also depends on how well your hardware and software are optimised.
• Boot-up time for Win95 and application software installed on the network is around 3 times the boot-up time for the same installed on local hard disk.
• Network processes such as network logon and display of network messages, depending on machine speed, typically consume 3/4 to 4/5 of the total boot-up time.

(Note: The boot-up time is defined as the time interval between the time when the self-test of the machine has just been completed and the time when Win95 is completely loaded. It consists of three phases, namely, the network logon phase, the show message phase, and the startup phase. Interested users may refer to the "Evaluation Report on Network Win95 Startup Time Analysis" accessible from the URL http://www.cityu.edu.hk/csc/win95bootup.pdf .)

As a general rule of thumb, if your Pentium II 233, Pentium 90, and 486-33 take significantly more than 1 minute, 1.5 minute, and 3 minutes respectively to boot from the network, you may contact the CSC Help Desk at ext. 7658 for help. A special team will then be dispatched to provide you with free optimisation services. Alternatively, you can consider installing Win95 and all the required application software on your local hard disk instead of loading them from the network to speed up the boot time. However, this has the following drawbacks as well as advantages:

Drawbacks:

• Incur additional first-time installation work or cost.
• Incur additional application software license costs (as these licenses can no longer be shared within department or within campus).
• Require more subsequent support effort (as you have to constantly guard against virus attack and accidental deletion of files belonging to the Win95 and the application software, and to try or adjust different settings, etc.), thus increasing the support costs.
• In the case of file corruption due to disk malfunction or virus attack, it will also take a longer time to reinstall or restore all these software.
• From time to time or upon notification from the CSC, users have to manually start the updating process of some system files belonging or related to those locally installed software as these updates can only be applied from their PCs but not remotely from network.

Advantages:

• Faster boot-up time and software start-up time.
• Users can still run application software even when the departmental file server is down.
• Users can be self-supported as their office PCs are entirely under their control.
• Users can have total freedom in choosing whatever application software they prefer as long as they are compatible with the CSC supplied software modules for accessing central services.

In summary, users can enjoy worry-free, support-free network software at the expense of longer boot-up time and software start-up time. Alternatively, users can reduce these time by installing all software onto the local hard disk but at the expense of higher license costs as well as greater supporting effort or costs.

Computing Services Centre City University of Hong Kong ccnetcom@cityu.edu.hk