Boot

Testing the effects of different CPU and memory configurations is easiest when you run the tests on a powerful machine and restrict it to the required number of CPU cores and amount of RAM. Microsoft’s documentation of the relevant command is missing an essential parameter. Here are the commands you need.

Analyzing slow boots is a difficult task. You need to install software like XPerf and master its far-from-intuitive command-line options to generate a trace file that you can then analyze. Once you find a possible cause for the long startup duration you never know if it is specific to the machine you analyzed or if it affects other PCs, too. In other words: XPerf, although powerful, is difficult to master. And it does not scale. uberAgent does. And it is super-easy to use.

Let use take a look at some graphs I created with Windows Performance Analyzer (WPA), showing a typical corporate laptop boot Windows 7. Detailed information on creating such a trace can be found in my earlier article Analyzing a Slow Boot with Windows Performance Recorder & Analyzer.

In the last five years Xperf has gained popularity as an administrator’s secret weapon for battling all kinds of performance issues. But just when it was on the brink of becoming as mainstream as such a tool can be, Microsoft superseded it by something else: Windows Performance Recorder.

Today it is still as common as it was in the 90s to go for a coffee after switching on the PC in the morning, only to find it still booting when coming back several minutes later. SSDs have not arrived in the average office yet, and even they can only cure some of the diseases that cause computers to start up agonizingly slowly.

Doesn’t every IT pro dream of finding a secret switch, a switch that increases clock speed, doubles the amount of RAM or makes the PC boot faster? Some do, and I admit I was fascinated when I heard that changing a simple boot option would significantly speed up startup time. I made some tests which confirmed what I had heard and blogged about my findings. A lot of people picked up that post, I was happy and everything was great - until I found out I was wrong.

[What I wrote here is wrong. Please read this follow-up article.] Here is a very simple way to reduce the time it takes to boot Windows 7 by around 20% (the exact number depends on the hardware).