Few days ago I installed Windows 98SE for a very first time in last 20 years... (on period correct p2 hardware, using a 10gb ide hdd). On the very first normal boot I was shocked when it booted into the desktop in under 1 second!

I shut it down and I started it again 2 more times. Every single time it took under 1 second to boot from the moment the BIOS starts loading the boot sector.

I remember well running a similar system back in the day, having 30~40s boot times and considering them normal. Once I installed chipset drivers (via 4in1), mx440 nvidia-version a driver, sound driver for an isa opti card, wireless PCI network card the boot time became close to what I remembered (about 30s).

I can't say any one of those drivers caused it. The biggest impact was the gpu driver, but I also changed resolution to 1024*768.

There doesn't appear to be much activity going on as it boots.

Also I later installed all the official hotfixes from the so called "unofficial sp3". This didn't seem to make any difference.

So I decided to start this thread asking if anyone knows some way to perhaps go back to those 1s boot times without drivers?

Also the system is running fine. Performance is as expected (it has been running 3dmark99 on loop for last 6h to check gpu stability), prior to that I run memtest overnight.

Back in the day I did work with all those systems from nt4, 98,2000 and 2000 server (2003 server, sbs etc), but all the tricks I knew from back then seem to be mixed a bit in my memory. It is 20 years later after all. I seem to remember there was a Microsoft tool that let you time your boot. It would then draw graphs showing various drivers load times, hold times waiting for init of various things etc. Unfortunately I don't remember if it was on win98, or server, or maybe it was on WinXP? 😀

Then there was another microsoft tool to "organise" all drivers physical locations on the HDD so when system boots it can load them all one after another quickly without the HDD head having to seek to different parts of the platter.

I remember one frequent user complaint from back then were really long boot times of over 2minutes, but this was usually network related and affected machines that were configured in a workgroup or local network with a server.

If anyone knows names of those tools, or any other tricks to speed boot times, please let me know.