DOS BOOT

This plugin gives you control over the many undocumented settings that affect Windows when it is booting up. Using this plugin can speed up Windows loading and give you more free memory.

Using The Plugin

The main screen of this plugin is shown below:

Drive Compression

Windows contains drive compression software that can be used to effectively double the space on your hard drives. The problem is that these compression systems can be slow, and can hog memory - so not many people actually use them. If you do not use any of the drive compression systems mentioned, DriveSpace and DoubleSpace, then click the relevant option to completely disable them. The drivers for the compression systems will then not be loaded and you will easily gain some extra free memory.

Boot Options

These options allow you to control how Windows boots up. If you do not want Windows to load automatically, but instead you want to be presented with a DOS prompt, then selecting the first option - Prevent Windows from automatically loading - will achieve this for you.

When Windows starts up it will automatically wait a few seconds for function key to be pressed before loading Windows (while the text 'Starting Windows' is displayed on screen). For example, pressing F8 will show the Windows boot menu that contains many useful options to recover from problems in Windows. This is very useful, but slows down Windows when it is loading. You can speed things up by, or slow things down if you wish, by changing the 'Wait for function key press' setting. If you are sure you will never need to use the function keys on startup, you can speed things up as much as possible by deselecting the 'Enable function keys when the system boots' option.

As already mentioned, you can get a menu of useful options to appear by pressing the F8 key when Windows starts. If you wish you can force this menu to always appear by selecting the option 'Always show the boot menu when Windows starts'. If you use the boot menu, you will notice that is has a little countdown, and when this reachs zero it will load Windows. You can set how long the menu will be displayed for before starting Windows by changing the 'Display the boot menu for' setting.

Other

There are several other settings that affect Windows while it is starting up, and they are listed in the 'Other' section.

Load Windows above the 640k boundary - There is a small area of memory between the first 640k and 1024k that is called the high memory area. It is not important to know why this memory area exists, except to say it is a leftover from the old MS-DOS days. By setting this option Windows will try to load as many of its drivers as possible in this area of memory, and will give you a little bit more free memory in Windows.
Display the Windows Logo Screen when loading Windows - When loading Windows you will be familiar with the logo picture that is displayed. If you are fed up of this logo you can disable it by deselecting this option. This has the side effect of make Windows load slightly quicker as well. If you want the logo to display again, just enable this option.
Enable Double Buffering of SCSI devices - This option should only be enabled if you have any SCSI devices installed in your system. Most PC's for home use do not have any SCSI devices. If you do not have any SCSI devices, then disable this setting to gain you a little bit more free memory.
Enable creation of the file BOOTLOG.TXT on Windows startup - This file is a troubleshooting file that you can use if you are having problems with Windows. Disabling this setting will prevent the file from being created, and will also speed up Windows loading time a bit.
Allow safeboot warning messages to be displayed - When Windows starts in Safe Mode, it will display several messages to this effect. Disabling this setting will prevent these messages from being displayed.
Automatically run scandisk when Windows starts - This setting has three possible values. 'Never' means that scandisk will never be automatically run when Windows starts, even if Windows crashes. 'After prompting' means that scandisk will run when Windows starts up when Windows detects a problem - Windows may have crashed when you ran it before, for example. A prompt will be displayed on the screen before scandisk runs allowing you to skip the scan if you wish. 'Always' means scandisk will always check your disk drives for errors when Windows starts.

Recommended Settings

If you do not use DriveSpace or DoubleSpace, disable both of them to free up some memory.

Enable the function keys when windows starts, as the F8 key can be very useful if you have problems with Windows, but set the delay down to 1 or 2 seconds.

Select the 'Load Windows drivers above the 640k boundary' setting. This will gain you some extra free memory.

Stop the Windows logo from displaying, it serves no real purpose and slows down the loading of Windows.

Disable the BOOTLOG.TXT file. The troubleshooting information it contains is only of use to Windows experts, and it slows down loading slightly.

General Note

All of these settings will take effect the next time you start Windows.