Since the beginning of modern computing, and especially in recent years, the performance of PCs and laptops has increased almost exponentially. They work faster and faster in all kinds of tasks, whether playing games or doing any type of calculation, but their starting speed It seems that this is still an open issue. has it been achieved limit how fast you can start a pc?
Thanks to the great improvements in processors, RAM memory and especially storage devices with SSD, the speed at which any PC performs any type of task has been significantly improved; For example, if opening Word took 10 seconds on a PC 10 years ago, on a modern PC with NVMe SSD it only takes a few seconds. But what about the boot sequence? Do we need less now than 10 years ago?
Your PC is not so fast because of the boot sequence
Lots of things happen during PC startup, especially verifications (and that’s largely what we call POST). During this process, the PC hardware performs self-diagnostic tasks to verify that everything is correct, and once this process is complete, it proceeds to load the operating system. Therefore, we could say that PC boot time is influenced by SSD speed when it comes to start the operating systemsuch as the time it takes for the motherboard and hardware components to complete their self-diagnostic tasks.
In recent years, the time it takes for PCs to boot the operating system has improved significantly, not because this process has been optimized (rather the opposite), but because storage devices have significantly improved their performance. and that it allowed us to drastically reduce loading times.
I personally remember, at the dawn of modern computing when I started, how long it took my 66 MHz 486 DX2 to boot into Windows 95, with a simple 20 GB IDE hard drive that could easily take a few minutes to allow me to interact with the PC. Now everything is much faster, and in fact, from the moment you press the power button on the box until the Windows desktop appears and you can interact with it, it only takes a few seconds.
However, in the times we live in, those 20-25 seconds it takes for the computer to boot up might seem too long, and it might take only 5 seconds to load the operating system. As we said, this is due to the diagnostic process and the checks carried out by the computer’s hardware, a process that, although it has improved and taken less time than on PCs of yore years old, continues to be a drag in terms of speed. may be able to boot the PC (ignore the time it takes for computers to wake from sleep or hibernation here, as POST is not performed on these).
Has the limit been reached?
For now, that seems to be the case, although there are a few “tricks” that can help reduce the time it takes for your PC to perform these 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 certain things in the boot sequence. Therefore, be very careful if you perform any of the actions that we are going to list below, because you will be “messing with the BIOS”. Do so at your own risk.
Note: Keep in mind that the names of the options we are going to discuss differ depending on the motherboard manufacturer and model.
- To start, under the BIOS BOOT tab, 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 for” to find the operating system and boot from it. If you only have one storage device, disable ALL options except for that device so it doesn’t search for all the others.
- If you only have SATA/PCIe NVMe devices, disable the IDE controllers so the card doesn’t check them and save time.
- If you have no devices in RAID, also disable RAID controller checking.
- Same with the 1394 controller.
- If boot from LAN is enabled, disable it. This option is often the cause of long POST delays.
