Hoax

The following hoax is making the rounds. The truth is that the setting you're encouraged to change should in all normal cases be left to automatic. The hoax instructions below are believed to be pure snake oil, but they are repeated here just in case you want to test them anyway.

Instructions

This hint is only useful if your computer has more than one processor core. Modern processors that have two, four, or more cores can benefit from this.

A few people have mentioned that with the tweak, Windows Mail starts instantly, as opposed to needing several seconds before. This is unexpected, because it shouldn't have anything to do with booting. If anybody can confirm or even explain this, please add a comment below.

Warning

This is not for the faint-hearted. Some users have experienced various problems after applying this tweak. On some computers an activation was required. Also if you're using Bitlocker, you'll want to make sure that you've got access to the BDE FEK file or the recovery password. When you reboot after applying this tweak, it will trigger the BDE boot protection.

Step by step tweak instructions

By default, Vista boots only from one core. To use more cores already at boot time, you have to change a manual setting as follows.

1. Click on: [Start]
2. Click on: Run...
3. Type in: msconfig
4. Click on: [OK]
5. Click on the tab: Boot
6. Adjust the number of cores to the number your processor actually has.
7. Click on: [OK]

The next time you boot, Windows Defender may try to block msconfig, which was trying to run to tell you that you had made some changes. Msconfig always throws a UAC (User Access Control) prompt and this causes it to be blocked. Right click on the Blocked Program icon in the system tray (normally lower right) and run the blocked program. Put a tick in the box to not show you this again.

The speedup may not be overwhelming, as much of the boot process is disk-bound, but I guess we gladly take what we can get for free.

User result statistics

If you decide to try this anyway, please see the results of others and report your own results here. If you don't want to vote right now, but just want to look at the results, click below, then click on the Results tab.

1. Speed
2. Problems