COMPUTER HARDWARE

Although I covered most of the ways to speed up Windows boot timein another article, I encountered a unique roadblock recently that made me write this article.

During the last week I was asked by a customer to upgrade one of their office computers from Windows 98SE to Windows XP. Normally this is pretty standard, however because their current Hard Drive was only a 20GB with a gig or so remaining I wanted to upgrade their hard drive as well.

I proceeded to ghost the drive to a larger hard drive and then installed an upgrade version of Windows XP on top of Windows 98 to preserve all of their settings and programs.

Everything went flawlessly, until I was finished...

After checking multiple settings in the BIOS, I compared the old and new hard drives. Everything seemed to be normal, except one. The old hard drive was setup to Cable Select and as my normal routine I had set the new hard drive as a Master drive. I changed the new hard drive to Cable Select, rebooted the computer, and the Windows logo screen came on seconds after the POST screen as before. Therefore, I have to add one more item to my list of ways to make Windows boot faster. Try changing the hard drive from Master to Cable Select, check the boot up speed and switch back to Master if you don't see a change.

Master/Slave Settings

Now for a refresher course on hard drive connections. When connecting more than one hard drive to a computer on the same IDE controller, you generally have to assign one as the primary (master) and one as the secondary (slave). You do this by changing the jumpers on the hard drive next to the power connector. Normally, the drive will have a diagram to let you know which jumper should be set for a master drive and which to set for a slave drive. You'll notice in the picture below the jumpers are circled on the end of the drive and the top of the drive shows the diagram to follow.