TSGL: Dell Dimension - too slow

[Don Penlington]

Tilman wrote:
>The problem anyway (or most of it) seems gone after I changed the bios
>settings for drives that hadn't been installed. Switched from 'Auto' to
>'not installed' or similar. Now bootup ist FAAAAST: it's now down to 25
>% of the 3 minutes it took before - 45 seconds!>>


That's good. Surprising that such a simple alteration would make so much 
difference to boot time.

My own personal benchmark for boot time from power-on to desktop first 
appearing is 32-50 seconds.  I'm happy to settle for anything up to 60 
seconds. Over that, it's time to start asking questions.

I've generally found that fast/slow boot times usually mean fast/slow 
performance.  Not entirely logical, but what is???

Strangely, I've found those same boot times almost identical for all my 
computers right back to W95 days. As computers get bigger, so does the 
software load.  We never seem to get ahead of the game!

I have occasionally seen 28 seconds when the computer is brand new and 
unsullied by installed software/hardware.  But in real life, 45 seconds is 
pretty acceptable.

I wonder if anyone is consistently under 25 seconds for a cold boot?

I reckon running W95B on a new state-of-art computer should have a boot 
time around 10 seconds. Has anyone tried it?

Can't wait for quantum computers and nano computers.  Everything will be 
instant. Including crashes.

With my new nano-computer being around a millionth of a Centimetre wide, I 
wonder what the On-Off power button will look like.

Don Penlington

 From the Beach at Surfers Paradise in sunny Queensland.
Computer tutorials, local scenery,  and other things at my website:
http://users.tpg.com.au/deepend/index1.html