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Incease boot speed / pc alarm.


W4RP3D

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I have a large music collection and cant be bothered to keep changing the CD on in my HiFi in my room and I cant afford an ipod or simlar mp3 player that can hold all my music at the moment. When my brother got a new pc and no longer want his old one I quickly jumped at the chance to have it.

It now holds all my music collection and is up in my room pluged into my Hifi. (i also put a wireless card in it so i can access music on my main pc). Unfortuantly the pc isnt brillent its very very slow at booting. (i wanted to hibernate it because it userally boots quicker then but unfortunatly it crashes half way though boot and freezes). My question to you is is there any way i can make it boot quicker (its running XP, i dont really want to change that and ive already done Msconfig and disable some startup stuff)

If its hard to boot it quicker is there anyway of createing a timer which would turn it on at a certain time i dont want to leave it on cause it to noisy at night and want it on as soon as i wake (got to have music on when im getting ready for the day lol) as i understand the swicth to the pc is just a simple push switch. Just an idea but could i hack up an alarm clock instead of beeping just connects the to wires of the switch to gether for a few seconds how. who would this be done?

Thanks

W4RP3D

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Time to finally work out what "Wake Up on LAN" is for i think. And just set another machine to trigger it.

or

Is there no way you could put the PC in another room and network it to a faster booting machine? I use a old laptop and another "server" in the boiler room for this myself. Its only a P2 but it comes out of hibernation in seconds, and the server has been on since christmas without a reboot. Plus the notebook is much quieter than my main machine, which is good for when girls say the sound of 20 fans isn't setting the mood...

You don't even need a mouse, keyboard and monitor for this method. All you need to do is setup VNC/Remote Desktop on the headless box (just set bios to ignore the missing bits), and just network into it when you need to change a setting. Which if you set it up properly, you will hardly ever need to do. Just make sure the firewall has the right ports open (5900 & 5800 for vnc) and the antivirus is set to auto update. Then share the right folders and add them as network drives on your other PCs. Works like a charm for me.

If you want to take it further, run something like Slim Server on the server for a fancy front end.

or

But you probally don't want to have to buy a notebook for just this. So what i would suggest is to look in the bios and see if there is an option to boot at a set time. I used to do this when i was a kid. Same problem, very slow boot, but i wanted 20mins on the computer before school. Used to work perfectly with win95. Then just put a winamp playlist in the startup links, and devise your prefered method of playlist creation (by hand or with some funky script).

also

For some reason older towers never had much luck with hibernation, always seemed to hang like your getting IME. The "server" I have is about 5 years old, and has no luck with it despite replacement PSUs and HDs, so it just stays on 24/7 now.

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Time to finally work out what "Wake Up on LAN" is for i think. And just set another machine to trigger it.

or

Is there no way you could put the PC in another room and network it to a faster booting machine? I use a old laptop and another "server" in the boiler room for this myself. Its only a P2 but it comes out of hibernation in seconds, and the server has been on since christmas without a reboot. Plus the notebook is much quieter than my main machine, which is good for when girls say the sound of 20 fans isn't setting the mood...

You don't even need a mouse, keyboard and monitor for this method. All you need to do is setup VNC/Remote Desktop on the headless box (just set bios to ignore the missing bits), and just network into it when you need to change a setting. Which if you set it up properly, you will hardly ever need to do. Just make sure the firewall has the right ports open (5900 & 5800 for vnc) and the antivirus is set to auto update. Then share the right folders and add them as network drives on your other PCs. Works like a charm for me.

If you want to take it further, run something like Slim Server on the server for a fancy front end.

or

But you probally don't want to have to buy a notebook for just this. So what i would suggest is to look in the bios and see if there is an option to boot at a set time. I used to do this when i was a kid. Same problem, very slow boot, but i wanted 20mins on the computer before school. Used to work perfectly with win95. Then just put a winamp playlist in the startup links, and devise your prefered method of playlist creation (by hand or with some funky script).

also

For some reason older towers never had much luck with hibernation, always seemed to hang like your getting IME. The "server" I have is about 5 years old, and has no luck with it despite replacement PSUs and HDs, so it just stays on 24/7 now.

sounds like fun VaKo...i have a brokenish ibook g3 clamshell which i could use as a music server...but its only got a 9gb hdd =(

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check the cmos for wake on key press ( sorry i forget the name right now). you can set it to your keybroad, mouse(if it is usb mouse wake on usb is supported in 1.0 and 2.0 i think). i had a 800mhz amd system with a msi mobo that had that function. i would wake up hit my space bar and go and do my daily wake up routine then when i got back i was at login prompt.

see if that works

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check the cmos for wake on key press ( sorry i forget the name right now). you can set it to your keybroad, mouse(if it is usb mouse wake on usb is supported in 1.0 and 2.0 i think). i had a 800mhz amd system with a msi mobo that had that function. i would wake up hit my space bar and go and do my daily wake up routine then when i got back i was at login prompt.

see if that works

i want a spare box =( and a kvm switch too. god i need a job :D

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You say you don't really want to change from XP, but this could be a good chance to experiment and have alot of fun with other operating systems, in particular I would look at some of the dedicated media center type operating systems.

Although if you want to stay with XP and want it to boot quicker then you have two options:

1) Upgrade the hardware, which I don't think is something you want to do?

2) Optimise your current install, you say you've disabled a few things etc but theres probably alot more you could do, do some googling for "speeding up XP boot time" etc, theres been hundreds of articles on it. Theres alot of things you can cut out of XP.

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yeh, I have an msi (834E) motherboard, in the bios trhere is a set to wake up alarm, and u set the time,, and date or every day of the month. It can boot from a cold start as long as it has power, and the power supply is on (yews its not a ture cold start cuz its eik 4 watss and hor but still)

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in my bios there is that option although ive tryed it 4 or 5 times and it doesnt do anything ?!? :?

(and yes it is plugged in lol :lol: )

o this is quite n00bish but is there anyway to skip the login screen (theres only 1 user and it has no password)

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dont worry bout skipping the login screen i found how to do it for any one who didnt no its:

Run --> control userpasswords2 --> untick require username and password to use this machine

but im still having problems with booting it up at the time i wish.

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W4RP3D you said it hangs during hybernation, but have you experimented with the various "sleep" capabilities of your machine... Many machines can "shutdown" into a sleep mode where they cut everything to minimal power usage, not only do they power down drives but many can power down all the cooling fans because they "turn off" everything that requires cooling, but the great part is that the minimal power they keep on keeps your memory loaded, so you press the button in the morning (keyboard, mouse, or power button) and the machine wakes up power up your hard drive, and typicaly in just a matter of a 10 seconds or so, your back up and running full power... If your system doesn't power down the fans then you could look into a fan control box for your cpu... then at night you when you put the machine to sleep you flip a second switch that throttles down the fans, then in the morning turn the fans on and wake up the computer... Just a couple thoughts hope their helpful

Have fun,

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its old prob bout 5/6 years i bought it from my school for a fiver (bout $8.60 my american friends lol). Pentium III 451MHZ with 384mb of SDRAM.

Yer it hangs on restoring hibernation I havent tryed sleep ill give it a go.

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  • 6 years later...

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