Enable all your cores on Vista start-up

[Hatchett]

Did you know that even if you have a dual or quad-core processor Windows Vista doesn't boot using all of them.

This can be solved easily by going to the msconfig control and changing it.
Here's how:

Open msconfig (easiest way is click start and search 'msconfig' and click enter).
http://img67.imageshack.us/img67/363/msconnc8.jpg
Once there go to the 'Boot' tab and click 'Advanced options'.
Then change the drop down box to the amount of cores you wish to enable for start-up.

http://img150.imageshack.us/img150/851/windowsstartupkn5.jpg

If this doesn't take that much off your boot time, then it's probably your hard drive holding it back.

[Nidu]

Hey Hatchett, thanks for the advice. I didn't know that about vista. One thing, is that for the 32 version or the 64 version? I'm sure it doesn't matter. Anyways, good stuff!

[MidTown]

after a lot of testing, many people confirmed that this doesn't extra performance...

[kakbits]

thank you for the information.I maybe try this.

[Hatchett]

This works on both 32 and 64 bit Vista.

You won't see a performance gain if your hard drive is slow. As it will be your harddrive that the rest of your system is waiting on during boot. If you have RAID or a really good drive this should take 2 - 8 seconds off your time depending on that drives read speed.

[Psnz]

Nah no difference for me.lol

[Arsener]

Do you really think Microsoft developed an OS that doesn't fully use the latest CPUs at its default settings ? I don't think so .

Using those settings you can set the number of CPUs to use , but if it isn't set on anything it will use all of them .

[CaptainCapslock]

Useless tweak. The HDD is always the bottleneck. When I boot from RAM, I can boot in 15 seconds. Booting from hdd takes about 1 minute. So enabling cores is useless.

[SuicidalGenocide]

No wonder my boot up takes so much time, and no wonder... my PC doesn't run as fast. Knowing Vista is a 3gb power hungry POS, using a duel core should still give me some edge. Hopefully, running it from boot now, it'll increase some of it's boot speed. Thank you.

[CataracT]

i adopted your advice and saw some improvment .
thanks

[EwJim]

Good info!