Laptop boot time improvment, options?

[Cyrus]

hi guys, i currently had a mid spec inspiron (not sure of spec 1 gig ram intel core duo 1.8ghz and 120gig hdd) may soon change it for a vostro but ill work with this for now.

anyway boot times are an issue, as its often left switched off and then turned on quickly to browse internet etc it takes over 2 mins to get a usable desktop, ive changed xp for vista and it seems a little better now but ive seen express slot solid state drives (16gb) in the us and i was wondering are they an option as a boot drive on a laptop?

would it work and if it does would the boot times be good?

also ive seen a lot of people mention s3 hibernate? will this work on a laptop that isnt plugged in and if so how long will it hibernate for before shutting down due to lack of juice

 

[thefishdude]

over time pcs graduallyt get slower to boot up, tsi is due to the use they get and all the programs and stuf that have been loaded and unlaoded leaving behind extra rubbish that slows the bot up. generally a operating system reinstall will speed things up again wich is why your may seem quicker now. 2gb of ram will also help speed up load times. another ting is turn of anything that is not needes straighta way.

with xp you should be able to load that in anything from 20 seconds upwarrds ona good machine.

 

[Avalon]

Only viable options from a hardware POV are increase RAM or replace the HD with one of the 7.2k units. You could go the whole hog and replace the HD itself with a solid state device but a) they're tiny, b) they're expensive c) I've not noticed any 2.5" units on general release (though I confess not to have looked).

From a software POV have you removed anything you don't actually need to run at start up. Itunes/program quick launchers/virus scanners doing a full scan etc ? Even my ancient (5+ years ?) old dell boots quicker than that and it's used daily and hasn't had a rebuild done in something like 2 years and only has 512mb ram!