As I have talked about using Windows 7 as my first operating system for my daily work, now I'm after tweaking boot menu.

In windows xp we have boot.ini so it was pretty easy to modify boot options, but now things are different. Remember that I have dual boot on my work machine, it's Windows Vista and Windows 7. As I had Vista preinstalled on my work laptop, it was primary operating system. After installation of Windows 7 I've got 2 options in the boot menu, one for Windows 7 and one for Windows Vista. By default first option is selected and it waits for 30 seconds to start booting Windows 7. I don't like that 30 second period so I'll tweak it to 5 seconds right now.

The tool we need is bcdedit. It's command lien utility so we run it from command prompt as an administrator. Just try for yourself bcdedit /? for program options because I'll not discuss all them in this post.

When I run bcdedit without parameters on my configuration I got this:

C:\Users\xxx>bcdedit

Windows Boot Manager
--------------------
identifier              {bootmgr}
device                  partition=D:
description             Windows Boot Manager
locale                  en-US
inherit                 {globalsettings}
default                 {current}
resumeobject            {eafec875-559d-11de-bf9b-97dc70044d1e}
displayorder            {current}
                        {fd3d0146-0d69-11dd-8ebf-c5fbbcf29c94}
toolsdisplayorder       {memdiag}
timeout                 30

Windows Boot Loader
-------------------
identifier              {current}
device                  partition=C:
path                    \Windows\system32\winload.exe
description             Windows 7
locale                  en-US
inherit                 {bootloadersettings}
recoverysequence        {eafec877-559d-11de-bf9b-97dc70044d1e}
recoveryenabled         Yes
osdevice                partition=C:
systemroot              \Windows
resumeobject            {eafec875-559d-11de-bf9b-97dc70044d1e}
nx                      OptIn

Windows Boot Loader
-------------------
identifier              {fd3d0146-0d69-11dd-8ebf-c5fbbcf29c94}
device                  partition=D:
path                    \windows\system32\winload.exe
description             Microsoft Windows Vista
locale                  en-US
inherit                 {bootloadersettings}
recoverysequence        {572bcd55-ffa7-11d9-aae0-0007e994107d}
recoveryenabled         Yes
osdevice                partition=D:
systemroot              \windows
resumeobject            {fd3d0147-0d69-11dd-8ebf-c5fbbcf29c94}
nx                      OptIn

Please note that your system configuration could be much different than this.

Before any serious work, we should make backup of boot configuration, that's accomplished easy with bcdedit /export c:\bootmenu.bcd.

Now we want to change timeout parametar under Windows boot manager section which default is 30. Now I wish to set it to 5. The right command is bcdedit /timeout 5.

To ensure that we have done it right, type again bcdedit without parameters.

Now I've got this under Windows boot manager section:

Windows Boot Manager
--------------------
identifier              {bootmgr}
device                  partition=D:
description             Windows Boot Manager
locale                  en-US
inherit                 {globalsettings}
default                 {current}
resumeobject            {eafec875-559d-11de-bf9b-97dc70044d1e}
displayorder            {current}
                        {fd3d0146-0d69-11dd-8ebf-c5fbbcf29c94}
toolsdisplayorder       {memdiag}
timeout                 5

We have set timeout parameter to 5 seconds.