Interesting topic - I wanted to test if this method would work for me and it didn't. I don't think it's bad though because my system was booting pretty fast already: - BIOS initialization and device detecion from pressing power on button: 16 seconds (I think we don't have much influence on this anyway) - Windows 7 startup till desktop becomes visible: 25 seconds - about 5 seconds till everything becomes fully responsive after visible icon refreshing on the desktop I got these times using my stopwatch and they are very consistent (unless restarting after a windows update). Considering my computer is pretty low specsed by today's standards I find these results very good. My computer: win 7 32-bit, 2GB RAM, 250GB WD 7200 HD, Athlon 64 X2 4000+ 2.10GHz, nVidia 7300 GT. The installed programs that run on startup are: Apache service, Mysql service, a small AutoHotKey script, VirtuaWin, CiDial (a small program that connects to my PPoE connection) and some other small services like PowerDVD, Realtek Audio Manager, Java updater, Nikon Message Center, Adobe Reader and Google Update. But - I run no anti-virus, I only run an AV scan on demand from time to time and I'm trying to keep my system clean. xbootmgr took almost one hour to complete with 6 reboots and disk defrag but the boot times didn't change at all. I'm in no way criticising this tool, I just want to report that on a system that is not bloated with unwanted programs it may have no effect at all. Most probably the built-in windows prefetcher have been doing its job well automatically.