>> 3) The startup time was extremely long, on the order of 30-40 seconds.
>> I know this is a known problem but I'm almost postitive it will be the
>> number one bug report filed by people who try out 5.9.0 on Windows and
>> will likely be a killer for some. I don't propose holding up the
>> release, which is after all a developer release, but we should probably
>> be ready for the reports this will generate. Has anyone figured out
>> what might be causing it? The most promising thing I recall was a
>> report that smaller hard disks didn't have as long a wait, but 5.5beta
>> doesn't seem to have that problem. Anyway, thought I'd mention it.
>Again, I haven't seen this on any machine I've tried. Was this issue discussed on the list at some point? Do you have any idea what the problem could be?
On my Windows98 Machine I have also a 50s startup Time.
But when I set the environment variable MAXIMA_USERDIR to an almost empty directory then startup time is only a few seconds.
I guess that by default , the MAXIMA_USERDIR is something like "C:" and may be there is during startup a routine which searches each libraries on the whole disk, or something like that.
So it is better to create a maxima.bat file containing:
set MAXIMA_USERDIR=C:\MAXIMA_USER
"C:\Program Files\Maxima-5.9.0.rc4\bin\xmaxima.exe"
Or add the following command to autoexec.BAT
set MAXIMA_USERDIR=C:\MAXIMA_USER