Windows performance toolkit - speed up Win 7 boot time

[Hard_ROCKER]

Okay people. I stumbled upon this while searching for ways to improve the boot time speed on Windows 7. In the old days of XP(for me it's old days because i dumped XP almost 5 yrs ago) we had the excellent Bootvis utility that we could use to speed up the boot process. Bootvis does not work on Vista/7 machines though and i was kinda sad that there wasn't a similar program for Vista/7, well at least that is what i thought.

Anway i followed the instructions from this thread on MSFN boards to get the Windows Performance Toolkit:

http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/146919-install-the-windows-performance-tools-kit/

And then i followed the instructions in this thread:

http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/140262-how-to-speed-up-boot-process-under-windows-vista-or-windows-7/

So after doing this, to my amazement my boot times went down considerably !

Just wanted to share this with the avast! community and would be interested to hear about your experiences with this procedure, was it as successful for you as it was for me ? My PC now reboots and gets back to a completely usable state in a blink of an eye. Well almost.  

EDIT: Just a warning, it takes a really long time to complete all this but to my mind, it's really worth it.

EDIT2: A script that measures your restart time. http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/720-restart-time.html

[SHARKY7SHARKY]

I'm happy with my boot time, from boot to browsing the web is 1 minute 5 seconds, & that's XP on a 7 year old computer.

[Hard_ROCKER]

This is for Windows Vista\7. For XP you need BootVis:

Instructions:

http://www.techrepublic.com/article/step-by-step-use-bootvis-to-improve-xp-boot-performance/5034622


Download:

http://majorgeeks.com/BootVis_d664.html

[essexboy]

I went from 45 to 29 seconds - not too shabby 

[Hard_ROCKER]

Nice !

[Lisandro]

Testing mine also...

[YoKenny]

I went from 45 to 29 seconds - not too shabby 

My Windows 7 system boots up a lot faster now!

Thanks Darth.Mikey 

It took 6 re-boots for it to set itself up.

[CraigB]

I only had to install the one hotfix to improve boot time from here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2510636 , not exactly sure of the time but has roughly taken about a third of the startup time, about 25-30 seconds to start browsing 
Thank for the links Darth.Mikey, this one hot fix seems to do what the other way mentioned does but alot simpler 

[Hard_ROCKER]

@YoKenny: You're welcome. Yeah it takes 6 reboots but as i said i think the end result is well worth it.  

Now your PC will be restarted 6 times. After the second reboot the MS defragmentation program is running and is placing the files into an optimized layout, so that Windows will boot up faster (for the description read what ReadyBoot is). The last Reboots are training of readyBoot. After the training is finished, you'll notice a huge improvement in startup.

Also please note this:

Note! DON'T USE OTHER DEFRAGMENTATION PROGRAMS AFTER THE OPTIMIZATION, USE ONLY THE INCLUDED MS TOOL, BECAUSE EVERY TOOL PLACES THE FILES AT A DIFFERENT OFFSET ON YOUR HDD, BECAUSE ALL TOOL THINK THEY KNOW IT BETTER!

Just for testing purposes i let Puran Defrag do it's optimization run after doing this procedure and my boot times rose about 10 seconds. I redid the WPT method and the boot times again went down. From now on i am only running Windows Defrag on my system partition. That doesn't mess up the optimization that WPT put in place.

[Hard_ROCKER]

@craigb: I already had that hotfix installed before doing the above procedure. That hotfix does not do the same thing as the WPT method.

[CraigB]

@craigb: I already had that hotfix installed before doing the above procedure. That hotfix does not do the same thing as the WPT method.

Well not the exact same thing, just speeding up the boot time is what i mean, but that on its own sure has made a difference.

[Hard_ROCKER]

I believe that. It did the same over here.

BTW craigb and essexboy, what is up with these huge avatars ??   

[CraigB]

I believe that. It did the same over here.

BTW craigb and essexboy, what is up with these huge avatars ??    

Tech's and essexboy's are bigger than mine and DavidR's  

[Hard_ROCKER]

Okay, something is wrong here on my end for sure...

Check this out:



WTF ??!  

[Hard_ROCKER]

And on IE9 it's normal:




EDIT: I figured it out. The problem comes when i run Chrome in avast!'s sandbox, when i run Chrome normally the avatars work fine. Strange problem. Have to report that to pk i guess.