Win-7 system blue-screen crashes every few days, rebooting takes a while (ReadyBoot?)

[Nomen]

I've got Win-7 Ultimate 32-bit installed on a Dell 6420, it was installed from a pre-configured install image with rolled-in updates as of the fall of 2016 (when telemetry started).   It has never done any windoze / micro$oft updating.

A blue-screen crash has been happening more and more often over the past year.  A few months ago I swapped out it's 4 gb of ram for new 16 gb.

It happened again this morning.  It takes a few minutes to reboot after these crashes, it sits there with black screen, mouse pointer only, while the drive is doing something.

I looked at event logs, I see this:

Session "ReadyBoot" stopped due to the following error: 0xC0000188

The maximum file size for session "ReadyBoot" has been reached. As a result, events might be lost (not logged) to file "C:\Windows\Prefetch\ReadyBoot\ReadyBoot.etl". The maximum files size is currently set to 20971520 bytes.

I have no idea what this readyboot thing is.  It may not be causing the crash, but is it causing the long start-up?

Can I configure this readyboot, optimize it or maybe eliminate it if it's not doing anything useful?

 

[Tripredacus]

Make sure you don't mean ReadyBoost. That was something introduced with Vista that let you use external (USB) drives for page file, but it never seemed to work very well.

[GrofLuigi]

3 hours ago, Nomen said:

Can I configure this readyboot, optimize it or maybe eliminate it

REGEDIT4
	[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\WMI\Autologger\ReadyBoot]
"Start"=dword:0

Try at your own risk. If it becomes totally unbootable, change ""Start"=dword:1" from Safe Mode or WindowsPE.

GL

 

[superleiw]

I've been using the Registry Tweak posted by GrofLuigi to completely disable it since the Windows 7 era and didn't have any problems with that feature after that.

From when I last tested, it still works up to Windows 11.

 

To configure manually :

Go to the Control Panel

->Administrative Tools

->Computer Management

->In the left panel, open Performance Monitor

-> open the "Data Collection Sets" and click on "Startup Event Trace Sessions"

-> In the right panel, double-click on "Readyboot"

-> In the "Trace Session" tab, you can now uncheck the "Enabled" checkbox

 

As an alternative, you can also set the Maximum Filesize of the Log File to 0 in these setttings (in the "Stop Condition" tab)

if you dont want to completely disable the ReadyBoot Service itself.

 

 

[Nomen]

Yes, this pertains to readyboot, not ready boost.

Ok, I've unchecked the trace session enabled checkbox.  What exactly will I lose by not enabling it?

I rarely shut down my laptop.  I just close the lid and it I guess goes to sleep or something.  I open the lid and everything comes back up.  Does any of that involve this "readyboot" thing?