Improvements help increase boot speed

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Improvements help increase boot speed

Windows XP contains several improvements that help increase its boot speed. In fact, XP boots and loads faster than any other Microsoft OS.

One of the improvements is XP's optimization of disk reads. Ntldr, the boot loader, minimizes disk seeking by caching large amounts of file and directory metadata.

A second improvement is disk enumeration, which now takes only two seconds to complete. In addition, XP can initialize several drivers simultaneously, instead of waiting for each consecutive device.

Major performance increases continue with the hibernation process. In hibernation mode, XP writes the memory contents to the disk in a Hiberfil.sys file. However, it writes only the used portion of the memory and compresses the memory pages before writing them. Since compressed memory pages take less space, writing performance is greatly improved. Furthermore, XP can compress memory pages and write to the disk at the same time.