If you’ve already made the conversion from some other version of Windows to Windows 7, you should have noticed that the boot time for the Windows 7 computer is noticeably faster than earlier versions of the OS. In Windows Vista, Microsoft played some games with how the OS loads to give the illusion that the computer was booting faster than it really was. Microsoft was hoping to leave you with the impression that you didn’t have a slow computer after all.

Boot Up And Wait

The shell game works until you want to use a part of the OS that the computer hasn’t loaded yet. You know the drill: click on something and wait… and wait… and wait. With Windows Vista, the OS would “guess” what you were interested in using based upon the applications you normally use. When you did something unexpected, your reward was waiting for the OS to finish loading.

With Windows 7, Microsoft has streamlined the bootup routine and has removed some bottlenecks that added precious second (which always feel like hours) to the boot time of the computer. No games this time; the computer really does boot faster than it did. (It shuts down faster, too but that’s a different post.)

Microsoft has identified a condition that could affect some computers running Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 that will indeed cause the computer to boot much more slowly than it should. The bug occurs when computers running Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 are connected to a high-resolution monitor that is set to some value other than 96 dpi. Bootup can be very slow under this particular configuration.

For most users, this won’t have any impact because the default dpi display setting is 96 dpi. If you’ve gone into the Control Panel and tweaked the dpi setting to make your on-screen display smaller or larger than the default, you could have a slow boot experience the next time you fire up the computer. To eliminate the problem, switch the default dpi display setting back to 96 dpi. If you gotta be you and use a different dpi setting, Microsoft does have a hotfix available for this little gotcha.

Under most circumstances, your boot times should be pretty speedy with Windows 7. If you do experience slowness, or you want to avoid acquiring a slow computer over time, consider loading RegCure onto your Windows 7 computer. RegCure is a trusted registry cleaner and works on all versions of Windows. RegCure can help keep your computer running as quickly as the manufacturer intended.

Photo Credit: Cheon Fong Liew, via Flickr