If you have more then one OS installed on your computer, but you don’t use it very often, then you would probably want to boost up the startup by skiping the OS selection screen.
First make sure your windows is set not to hide “protected oporating system files” (by going to Control Panel\Folder Options\View tab, and ucheck the “hide protected oporating system files” checkbox) Read More»
Often this number is set too high. But in some circumstances it is set too low. Depending on if the program is doing a lot of calculations in the background the computer may think that it is timed out. To prevent this increase the value of the timeout in the registry.
Start Regedit. If you are unfamiliar with regedit please refer to our FAQ on how to get started.
Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop
Select HungAppTimeout from the list on the right.
Right on it and select Modify.
Change the value to the new timeout value.
Reboot your computer.
If you dual-boot your computer with Windows XP and another operating system, you see an operating system selection menu on startup. If you typically boot into Windows XP and not the other operating system, you can speed up the dual-boot timeout value so that you do not wait so long for the boot process to select your default operating system and continue with the boot process. The default timeout value is 30 seconds but you can change this setting to 10. This gives you enough time to select the alternate operating system if you want but also speeds up the boot process. You can skip this section if you do not use a dual-boot configuration.
Follow these steps:
1. Locate the boot.ini file on your computer. It is a hidden file by default; mine is located in C:\boot.ini.
2. Open the file with Notepad (which is what opens it by default).
3. Change the Timeout value to 10 (see Figure 4-11).
4. Select File/Save and close Notepad.
