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I just upgraded my HDD to an SSD drive. I am running a completely fresh install and enjoy the short boot time. I tweaked the startup to be as fast as I could by removing unneeded apps and such. Nor am I running a solid desktop background (which causes a 30-sec startup delay).

I have a 2.1ghz 64 bit laptop with 4 gigs of ram, so it's not a liquid-cooled speed monster, but I checked some super high end PC boot vids on YouTube and noticed that they startup in almost the same time as my machine.

I also noticed that the glowing Windows 7 animation plays all the way no matter how fast the PC is. I turned off the animation, and the startup time is unchanged. I turned on verbose startup info and noticed that it runs until the very end, where it looks like it just sits there for no reason waiting for something to happen for a few seconds.

So now I think that the Windows 7 startup animation has a timer built into it that forces the computer to wait for no other reason than to play the full animation. Super-fast XP boot vids on YouTube seem to start much faster (and not just because they "have less to load").

Am I imagining things?

My question is: How can I turn off not just the animation, but the timer for the animation.

Here is a vid that tipped me off, I have no relation to the poster. (warning: soundtrack might be loud) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5LkX3xejJ4

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    I would be extremely suprised if the whole of Windows stops loading so that the animation can play through.
    – Wilf
    Commented Mar 10, 2010 at 20:34
  • Depends on the SSD, processor (2.1GHz could be anything) it all effects your speed.
    – user10547
    Commented Mar 11, 2010 at 0:34

4 Answers 4

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This article on the Engineering Windows 7 blog discusses the boot animation design: Engineering the Windows 7 Boot Animation

They say:

The sum of the boot code optimizations and removal of the pearl animation from Vista enabled us to add a rich, high-quality animation during boot, with no increase in the time it takes a user to reach the desktop.

With all the efforts they've made improving the boot performance and minimizing the impact of the boot animation, I'd be really surprised they added something as stupid as a timer to wait for the end of the animation.

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I actually found that the boot animation appears at the same time, but depending on how long windows thinks the startup will take, the animation speed will change accordingly for a higher frame rate and speed.

But I could be wrong.

I've never understood about these kind of features in operating systems and there is a possibility that there is no way that Windows can estimate the boot time at that point.

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i think on faster computers the animation will run faster, cancelling out the timer effect. on my gaming rig for example, the animation spins significanly faster, whereas my netbook sloooooowly moves the animation.

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Once the four bits of the Windows logo have joined together, the windows logo keeps glowing until your computer's done loading the OS, after which the animation just cuts off. There's no timer.

By the way, the netbook loads slowly because it's probably struggling with the animation (thus causing low FPS).

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  • This is not strictly true, because the computer could complete the boot sequence before the "bits" united. Fortunately, Windows adaptively speeds up the bits to make sure they get there on time.
    – PythonNut
    Commented Apr 23, 2014 at 2:12

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