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?

[superleiw]

Normally Readyboot should help with slightly faster boot times and faster recovery from hibernation by pre-fetching files.

But ironically it can cause the exact opposite if too much logging is happening, so in your case you are not losing anything.

This feature might have been useful to some extent when HDDs where the norm, but with SSDs or even NVMe it shouldn't make much of a difference.

 

[modnar]

On 12/22/2025 at 3:22 PM, Nomen said:

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....

What if you tried updating it with the Simplix Update pack for "Windows 7" (up-to-date with telemetry disabled)?

Regarding RAM: X86 version of Windows cannot use the additional RAM.