Comment by keyringlight

I remember using the BootVis tool (IIRC was an early part of what would be the performance toolkit) to profile the startup process, and then you could it to optimize the location of data loaded from HDDs to reduce the seeking required. Also back when PATA was still in use depending on your motherboard I seem to remember making sure windows wouldn't try to autodetect link speed on unused attachments as that could take ages trying to find something that wasn't there.