Reduce Boot Menu Delay In Ubuntu

If you dual boot between Ubuntu and Vista/XP you would must have noticed (and became frustrated) by the 10 second delay at the boot time where you can make your selection between Ubuntu or Windows.

Normally you only use one preferred OS and the other OS is rarely used. So you may want to reduce this selection period.

To do this fire up your terminal and type in the following

gksu gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

Now enter your password.

Now look for the following lines:
## timeout sec
# Set a timeout, in sec seconds, before automatically booting the default entry
# (normally the first entry defined).
timeout    X

Where the X is some number, mostly 10 sec

Change it to something like 2 or 3 (I use 3). 

Save the file and close it. 

Now if you ever want to boot into Vista or XP simply hit any key (up, down etc) wile the count down timer runs, to stop the count down timer then choose your OS.

Let us calculate how much time do you save by using this hack:

Suppose you start your PC 3 times in a day. You have changed the timeout to 2 sec, thereby saving 8 sec per boot. So in one day you save approximately 30 sec so at the end of the month you save around 15 min. However the real benefit of using this hack is the amount of frustration the boot menu gives is reduced.