Restarting Windows Without Restarting your BIOS

A PC with Vista Home Edition takes about one and a

half minutes to boot. An older machine with XP is about the

same. That's 30 seconds for the PC itself (the BIOS) to boot

up, plus a minute for the Windows operating system to boot.

Sometimes, you need to reboot Windows (e.g. when installing

new software), but there is no need to restart BIOS, too.

However, the default is to reboot both. (That's called doing

a "cold boot," rather than a "warm boot.") There's a trick

that works on both XP and Vista to get it to do a warm boot

instead, thus saving you 30 seconds per cycle.

Hold down the shift key while pressing the restart key from shutdown panel....