LemonJuice

I was implying something different at the end of my last post - I meant that sometimes windows takes longer to boot than usual because it has some extra tasks to perform like install an update or run some maintenance task. Maybe that first boot that was measured by xbootmgr was longer because of that, I didn't measure it with my stopwatch so I can't tell. But 55s was certainly not the usual boot time I experienced every day. From my observation this was somewhat improved after win XP. I remember this was more of a problem in XP where I had to wait a minute or longer after seeing the desktop until it actually becomes responsive. In win 7 more services seem to start before the desktop appears so the waiting for responsiveness isn't that long - I'm not an expert on this but these are my observations. I also thought it could be like this but my observations seem to suggest Andre was right that the measurement stops when the desktop appears - not when all services and startup programs are loaded. The final xbootmgr report of 20s matches my stopwatch when I stop measuring just when the desktop appears, and certainly it is before all startup programs are loaded. I don't think it would be easy to accurately measure when the moment of 'usability' happens since different services/programs start at different points in time (some are delayed, etc.), some are heavy on CPU usage while others have almost no impact running in the background so I guess it's much better to measure until desktop appearance since this is some definite point objectively. But as I said earlier after the desktop appears it takes about 5s for my system to be responsive - I can't tell if it's 100% responsive but I can start Explorer and other programs right away without any delays and xbootmgr optimization didn't change that. I could believe if there was some 5-10s. improvement in starting up background services that don't affect performance much but the results suggest that the boot time went from 55 to 20s! This is a huge difference and I'm sure it wouldn't go unnoticed. Therefore I assume that either xbootmgr measured time incorrectly or that first boot took unusually long for whatever reasons. I believe xbootmgr might have optimized something but it hasn't affected my system much - certainly not more than 1 or 2s.

Then it looks like the counting starts the moment "Starting Windows" text appears with the animated logo and ends when the "Welcome" screen begins to fade out, which is about 1 second before the desktop becomes visible - then the measurement is consistent with the stopwatch (20s). But what xbootmgr reported as boot time before optimization - 55s - is not true at all. My system never took that long to boot, I know for certain because I measured boot time many times before when I wanted to see how installing/uninstalling certain programs impacted the boot time, and of course before the optimization I did a few more measurements so that I could see any improvement. It is therefore impossible that my measurements were off - certainly not by such a huge margin. Either xbootmgr must have measured the time in a wrong way or maybe there was a rare coinsidence of windows doing some extra unusual tasks, updates, optimizations, etc. - just when xbootmgr did its first reading.

Well, the stopwatch certainly doesn't measure my feeling - I don't see how any other method can be more reliable (for any practical use, not theoretical) since the stopwatch shows the practical boot time, it shows what I experience as a user. But maybe xbootmgr measures the time in some other way that is unknown to me. Can you tell me what exactly is measured as bootDoneViaExplorer? When does the measurement start and when exactly does it end?

Okay thanks, I see now how to interpret the data. But these measurements must be way off and very inaccurate because I measured boot time many times before with my stopwatch and I am sure booting to the desktop was consistently 25s and now I learn it was 55s - the difference is too big and something must have gone wrong with how xbootmgr captured all those times. Results using my stopwatch clearly show that there was no speed improvement - at least not greater than 1 second. Perhaps there was some rare coinsidence of Windows performing some update or maintenance cleanup just when xbootmgr rebooted for the first time? The results leave a good impression of speed improvement whereas there was none...

<timing bootDoneViaExplorer="55121" bootDoneViaPostBoot="79721" <timing bootDoneViaExplorer="20579" bootDoneViaPostBoot="-1" So the values are lower in 02_summary_boot_end.xml, however -1 looks strange. For boot_BASE+CSWITCH_1.etl the graph is mostly green and orange with some very small amounts of blue and even smaller of blacks and reds. For bootPrep_BASE+CSWITCH_1.etl the graph is mostly black with small amounts of blue. I'm not sure what that means but I guess most of the cache should have been fine already.

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.