Whilst searching through my RSS feeds today I found a little gem that could give you a nice boot time improvement.
It seems that even on dual/quad/n core machines, Vista boots using only one core. Peter Provost has a solution he found that will allow you to take advantage of all of your cores.
In summary the steps involve going to msconfig and changing the number of cores.
To do that:
- Start –> Run
- Type msconfig, click Ok
- Click on the “Boot” tab
- Click Advanced Options
- Enable the checkbox titled “Number of Processors:”
- Change the number to your number of cores using the drop down box
- Click Ok
- Click Ok/Apply
- Restart
That is basically it, just follow those steps and you can enable Multi-Core startup.
This option also exists in Windows XP. It is under the tab named BOOT.INI, also under Advanced Options in there, however it is called /NUMPROC. A bit more advanced since there seems to be ini editing here, but either method isnt for a basic user