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I've noticed some weird behavior when dual-booting Windows 7 and Windows XP:

As long as I'm rebooting from Windows 7, everything is normal.

However, if I boot into Windows XP and then boot back from XP into Windows 7, my boot process differs slightly:

  • The boot stage is slower (i.e. the stage with the glowing Windows logo takes about twice as long) -- Windows seems to be doing some more work every time I'm coming from XP.
    However, the extra time is CPU time -- the hard disk isn't accessed much during that time.

  • The login process is faster (as though everything was already loaded/prefetched)

  • Overall, the process is a bit slower.

My guess is that it has to do with something related to NTFS, but I really have no real evidence.

Does anyone know what triggers this? (I have Windows XP SP3 and Windows 7 x64 SP1.)

Update:

I just booted from Windows 8 back into Windows 7, and that also seemed to cause the delay...

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user541686
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2 Answers2

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It seems like you are doing a warm reboot, while the dissimilarities between XP and 7 require a better initialization of the hardware adapters and registers, meaning a cold reboot.

Both boot modes are defined as follows:

Cold Boot (a.k.a. Cold Start) : Booting up from power-off condition.
Warm Boot (a.k.a. Warm Start) : Restarting the computer without turning the power off.

The Microsoft article Cold Booting Versus Warm Booting gives some hints :

A warm boot, accomplished by pressing the CTRL+ALT+DEL key combination, restarts the computer through the INT19h ROM BIOS routine. This warm-boot procedure usually does not go through the complete boot process; generally, it skips the power-on self test (POST) to save time. In addition, a warm boot frequently fails to reset all adapters in the computer's adapter slots.

To ensure that all adapters are properly reset, you should use the power switch to turn the computer off. Leaving the power off for ten seconds ensures that all the capacitors on the motherboard have time to discharge and should also give the hard disk drive a chance to stop spinning.

There is no complete list for all the adapters that are not reset for a warm boot. I know from experience that the clock is one of them, so that problems may occur when warm-booting between Windows and Linux which use the clock differently.

Apparently, such a difference also exists somewhere between XP and Windows 7 as well as 8.

harrymc
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The only logical conclusion I can come up with is the pagefile is managed differently between Windows 7 and XP, particularly the size allocated by the system.

Try configuring your system to not use a pagefile at all to test if this is indeed the problem.

Here below is an extract to support my theory.

Source

Page file size equal to RAM: Prior to Windows 7 the default paging file size was determined differently on different versions of Windows. But in general terms, when the paging file size was configured as “system-managed” its size would typically be calculated as RAM x (some number greater than 1) or RAM + (some number).

In Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 the default size is equal to the amount of memory installed in the machine. Your gut reaction to this is probably the same as mine was – to get a successful complete memory dump the paging file needs to be a little larger than RAM. How much larger probably goes back to what version of Windows you are running and other factors, but 300 MB is generally considered plenty of padding for the purposes of getting a complete dump.

Below are links to help you disable the pagefile

Disable Pagefile in XP Disable Pagefile in W7

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Dwayne Hinterlang
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