Top Tips

As with all speed improvement tips, there can be no 'cure-all' tip, so this tip should be used in conjunction with some of the other performance improvement tips published in our Speed Up Vista article.

Upgrading your hardware can also play a significant part in speeding up boot times on your PC - A hard drive with a faster spin speed will be able to send the information to the proceesor quicker, and in turn a faster processor will manipulate the data that much quicker, and then send it in turn to the RAM, and if there is plenty of RAM the information can be received and stored that much quicker.


Use multiple cores at Vista boot up.

One of the holy grails for almost any computer user regardless of Operating System, machine speed etc is fast start up times.

Whilst this tip won't give you instant start ups, it can make a considerable difference.

It's a little known fact that Microsoft Windows Vista by default is set to only use one processor core at start up, rather than the two (or maybe even four) that you probably have. Fortunately a simple tweak can easily fix this.

  1. Click the Windows Vista Start Orb & in the search box type 'msconfig.exe, & hit 'Enter'
  2. If you have User Account Control enabled, you will now need to enter your password.
  3. You will now be presented with the System Configuration console where you will need to select the 'boot' tab.
  4. Click on the 'Advanced' button, and in the next screen you will see an option marked 'Number of processors'
  5. Tick the check box and then in the drop select the number of cores to use at boot up.
  6. Once selected you will need to reboot for the changes to take effect.



This page last updated December 12th 2009 Bookmark and Share