Reducing windows XP bootup time

I’ve noticed that my laptop seems to be taking a long time to boot into windows XP. It doesn’t bother me much, since I rarely boot into XP. But the same thing was happening to a friends laptop and I decided to see what can be done.

Some suggestions/pointers I found in the internet that I’m going to try out are:

1. The system maybe waiting for a DHCP server to assign an IP.
2. Reduce timeout value in msconfig’s boot.ini tab ??
3. Run Bootvis to analyze the boot process and speed it up. A guide is available here.
4. Analyze and remove unwanted startup programs. Tools: Startup Inspector
5. Enable boot logging and look at the boot log. (Saved as ntbtlog. txt in the windows folder in NT/XP)
6. Eliminate unwanted fonts to increase boot speed
7. Some more tips are available in this article and this

Some articles

1. Making windows boot faster
2. Improve windows XP boot speed
3. Forum thread on speeding up XP boot and startup times.
4. How do I speed up my Windows XP startup.
5. TweakHound’s Super XP Tweaking guide