How can I make my WHS boot faster?

Caporegime
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It's an E2200 running at 2.20GhZ, with 2GB of ram. I don't need it to boot all that quickly in theory, as its on all the time, but when I do reboot, it takes a good 10-15 minutes to come back on, and I'm not really sure why. I'd considered getting another 2gb of ram for it as I'm using as a transcoding server for movies/flac now but I shouldn't have thought it really mattered for booting?
 
Is it slow at booting or at shutting down?

Super slow boot times on Windows are usually caused by a timeout condition. By that I mean your PC is trying to access something, failing and waiting for some time out period.

If it has a monitor you could disable graphical boot and see why it's stalling, or check your event log post boot.
On general Windows systems it's usually network, raid or USB drive related.

I don't use WHS though so I'm not privvy to it's specific issues. You might have better luck in the server part of the forum.
 
It's an E2200 running at 2.20GhZ, with 2GB of ram. I don't need it to boot all that quickly in theory, as its on all the time, but when I do reboot, it takes a good 10-15 minutes to come back on, and I'm not really sure why. I'd considered getting another 2gb of ram for it as I'm using as a transcoding server for movies/flac now but I shouldn't have thought it really mattered for booting?

My home server is running an E5X00 at stock with 2GB ram, and it boots in just a minute, with sabzdb, vnc, subsonic, xbmc and a bunch of iphone transcoding stuff. You machine must be waiting for something to initialize at boot, as even my old Atom server booted in only a minute or so!

Run a bootlog analysis to see what's causing the slowdown, as mentioned here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/835557
 
platypus
How can I make my WHS boot faster?
It's an E2200 running at 2.20GhZ, with 2GB of ram. I don't need it to boot all that quickly in theory, as its on all the time, but when I do reboot, it takes a good 10-15 minutes to come back on, and I'm not really sure why. I'd considered getting another 2gb of ram for it as I'm using as a transcoding server for movies/flac now but I shouldn't have thought it really mattered for booting?

I don't think it's your hardware, as I have only 2GB of ram, and a 2.8Ghz CPU, and have no problems with bootup times. Have you tried going into your msconfig, then to the startup tab, and unclicking the application's you don't want to startup. The software will still work, but in theory, it should quicken your bootup.
 
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Yeah similar as above I'm using Athlon 64 x2 2.5Ghz with 2Gb of ram and it only takes a couple of min at most so it must be your software.
 
I've run msconfig and there isn't anything loading apart from the windows drivers and my media server. It runs headless as well so I can't (without a fair bit of effort) really watch whats happening during boot.

It seems to be quick enough when shutting down. Will have a look at the bootlog.
 
what o/s are you running on it ?

any chance when you reboot you have it set to run clear down on temp files etc
 
Ive just setup a WHS for a friend of the family, yes ive gone overkill on the hardware abit (quad core AMD, 4GB RAM) but this was its future proofed for an upgrade to Vail in 2-3 years time. Boot up times are very fast for me, i think around 3-5 mins max. Check your software, has to be that, something reading or maybe even a disk is abit huffy.
 
Dodgy disks was the first though, but they pass all checks just fine. Might just reinstall it and see if that cures things.
 
Boot speed is mainly dependant on HD with some CPU. Going from 2GB to 4GB won't make any difference. I think WHS is based on the other MS Server OS's? As they take a while to boot, so could just be normal.

If you are encoding, you might want to look at swapping the CPU for another Core 2 Duo that has more cache. 1MB is going to be holding it back a fair bit. The E5400 is a touch quicker and has 2MB but ideally something like an E8400 would be good as it is 3GHz and 6MB cache (& 1333 FSB vs 800 but that doesn't make much difference) and still quite low power/heat.
 
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Download Soluto, to check what is taking its time. After installing it, the next time you restart it will show you how long every item has taken to start during the boot process :)
 
Download Soluto, to check what is taking its time. After installing it, the next time you restart it will show you how long every item has taken to start during the boot process :)

I like the look of that.

Will be cool if they add a force uninstaller for crap like google desktop, yahoo browser plugins and all that junk.

Looks like 'PC Decrapifier' but ever expanding
 
Download the Sysinternals Suite and run Autoruns. It scans your machine for everything that loads with windows. It makes MSCONFIG's Startup tab look like an after-thought.

Notably, Autoruns will point out any files that are missing/not found. Unchecking these entries could in theory speed up your boot time.
 
If you are encoding, you might want to look at swapping the CPU for another Core 2 Duo that has more cache. 1MB is going to be holding it back a fair bit. The E5400 is a touch quicker and has 2MB but ideally something like an E8400 would be good as it is 3GHz and 6MB cache (& 1333 FSB vs 800 but that doesn't make much difference) and still quite low power/heat.
Thats a useful thing to know, as originally it was just built to sit in a cupboard crunching rosetta units, but now its my main media server transcoding films and FLAC files, it's a tad slow and I do get hang ups occasionally.

Think I might get an E7500 as its £40 cheaper and has 3MB cache.
 
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