How to reduce boot time on XP

Keeping in mind that Bootvis may only trigger optimizations which are already periodically performed when running XP...

Since we're on the subject... the basic idea is to move the files that are accessed during boot to contiguous physical sectors on the hard drive thereby reducing seek times. On the few systems I've examined, the boot files were moved to higher number logical sectors which tend to correspond to physical sectors on inner tracks where transfer rates are slower (the difference between sustained transfer rates on inner and outer tracks can be 25%-35%, maybe even more in some cases would have to check). A picture of the type of layout I've seen:

UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUFFFBBFFFFFFFFF

Where U represents logical sectors containing ordinary files, F logical sectors containing no files, B logical sectors containing boot files. This is simplified and I'm leaving out some other categories that most disk defraggers and what not will show you. Now if you use a trial or purchased version of an appropriate tool (two defraggers that come to mind are O&O Defrag and PerfectDisk) you can see how things are laid out on your drive. One thing you might look for is something like this:

UUUUUUUFFFFUFFFUFUFUUUUFUFUBBFFF

Where there is alot of free space "below" the boot files. If you can consolidate that free space below the boot files and then move the boot files "down" and onto more outer tracks, you might speed boot file transfer rates somewhat. It wouldn't hurt, and it might very well help in some ways, to use a trial or whatever of one of the better disk defragmenting tools (the one that comes with Windows is primitive). It has been awhile since I played with one, but back when I was experimenting I came to like O&O Defrag and its By Name feature. You can read up on the different products and their features and play around with them, monitoring how they manipulate the boot files and what if any boot time improvement you see. Keep in mind that if the XP optimizer is given a chance to run after that, it may move them again. Hopefully to a better place than when you started, but no guarantees. Have fun ;-)