N.C. Aditya’s Blog

It is a common observation that after installing lots of software, the time Windows takes to boot up increases. Sometimes the difference may not be observable (for example: if you have lots of RAM like say 2GB or so), but most of the times it is quite annoying.

It is possible to make tweaks to Windows so that it boots faster. I am not aware of ways to tweak it manually, but here is a free tool called Bootvis, that can be used to automatically tweak Windows to decrease the boot times. Bootvis has been developed by Microsoft and it is not some third party tool. However, they have discontinued it and it is no longer available from Microsoft.com. You can download it from third party repositories or from here.

More information about Bootvis

Bootvis – Windows XP Boot and Resume Analysis Tool
Bootvis is a tool for easily enabling capture and graphical display of boot and resume performance trace data in Windows XP. Bootvis by itself will not change a system’s boot or resume performance. Bootvis is intended as an aid to allow designers and manufacturers to characterize their system’s performance during Windows startup in order to identify areas for further investigation and opportunities for performance improvement.

Bootvis can be used to analyze Windows XP startup performance from all off or sleep states, including:

System cold boot (power on from the ACPI S5 state)
Resume from hibernate (the ACPI S4, or “suspend to disk” state)
Resume from standby ( the ACPI S3, or “suspend to RAM” state)

Bootvis Command Line Options
Bootvis supports a number of command line options useful for scripting automation of trace collection or post-processing or trace data.

To list available command line options, run ‘bootvis /?’ from a command prompt.

The following command line options are supported.

Usage:

bootvis [options]
bootvis [filename]

Notes:

When using the -on switch, only 1 trace flag should be specified
The [n] parameter defaults to a value of 1 if it is not explicitly specified on the command line
.csv is a comma-separated value file; .txt is a tab-separated value file.

Options:

-on boot [n]
Collect [n] boot traces.

-on boot+drivers [n]
Collect [n] boot+drivers traces.

-on standby [n]
Collect [n] standby traces.

-on hibernate [n]
Collect [n] hibernate traces.

-off
Stop tracing; trace data is not saved.

-d [filename]
Save trace to output file.

-do [filename]
Save and open output trace file.

-summaryinfo [filename]
Opens the file specified and displays the resume summary window.

-driverinfo [filename]
Opens the file specified and displays the driver delay window.

-bootinfo [filename] [txt]
Open the file specified and save the boot summary to the text file [filename].csv.
If the [txt] option is specified, the output file is [filenam.txt].

-resumeinfo ms [filename] [txt]
Opens the filename specified and saves the resume summary to the txt file {filename].csv.
If the [txt] option is specified, the output file is [filenam.txt].
[ms] sets the driver delay threshold in milliseconds.

-callbackfile [filename] [param]
Opens output trace file after all traces are done.
Set the filename to NULL to clear the callback file.
[param] is the input parameter passed to the callback file.

-prepsystem
Optimize the system for boot tracing.

-nomsg
Suppress warning messages if the system does not support standby or hibernate.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 at 9:49 pm and is filed under Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.