Hi everybody I´m currently in a temporary exile away from my home computer and I´m stuck with a rather old desktop (no brand name) running WinMe and dial-up. Although two sticks of 128MB are present, apparently the AGB card has been allocated some of the RAM---or so I´m told---which leaves the usable RAM only 224MB. I managed to make a significant improvement in performance primarily by changing the HD (only 20GB, unpartitioned and with FATS32) from PIO to DMA. Actually, the apps now open very quickly but I really need to get it to boot faster. Right now, it takes 90 seconds to get it to where it´s ready to be used with only six (all essential) programs loading at start-up. I would love to hear any suggestions as to how I can get this machine boot faster (assuming this is possible) without buying more RAM? TIA Paul

You might be able to save a couple of seconds by going into the bios and making sure your 1st boot device is the harddrive. This will keep the computer from 1st checking the floppy and cdrom drives before using the HD.

- scan for spyware - use MSCONFIG to stop unnecesary crap from loading at startup - add the following line under [Options] in the MSDOS.SYS file: BootDelay=0

Firehawk Thanks for your reply however, I have already done that. Actually, I would like to hear from anybody as to whether, with the limited resources at my disposal (224 MB RAM, 1.8 GHz CPU and WinMe) getting the computer to boot in less than 90 seconds is at all realistic. I´d appreciate any comments as even those not directly applicable are generally food for thought. Paul

Jam Thanks for your reply. I´ve already carried out the first two of your suggestions but not the third. Actually, I had been looking for whatever the equivalent to WinXPs boot.ini file is in WinMe to make exactly the changes you suggest. However, I cannot find the MSDOS.SYS file on my computer. A search for MS*.SYS showed up 9 files but none were the one you mentioned. Is there an alternative file type for this boot delay information? Thanks again Paul

"limited resources at my disposal (224 MB RAM, 1.8 GHz CPU and WinMe" In fact, those are *abundant* resources for WinME TweakUI or Bootedit will allow you to readily make those changes - MSDOS.SYS is a hidden, protected file We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true

256 meg of ram and a 1.8 gig processor is way more than you need to run ME efficiently . If you have an intel processor and built in intel graphics card you can download the intel application accelerator and this will speed boot up times and improve HD disk performance , worked well on my machine . Go to http://support.intel.com/support/chipsets/iaa/sb/cs-009293.htm