Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/akraus1/archive/2014/02/06/155386.aspx
MS is investing heavily into its ETW infrastructure now and in the future. You can find very good online trainings at MS Virtual Academy: http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/training-courses/windows-performance-jump-start#?fbid=g4hL6pwMe94. I have watched some videos today and they have really great content online about rare topics. Personally I found On/Off Transition Experience the most enlightening one. After this video you can rip your slow booting machine apart and make it boot much faster. With the content presented there I was able to cut down my boot time from over two minutes down to one minute, which is really great once you know where to look. The biggest issue on my machine was the DebugSvc was having over 90s of service init time which delayed the whole boot and the initialization of all other services a very long time. By simply disabling the service I got a really good improvement there. Another thing is to check if during your boot .NET 2 applications are still running. Most of them can run also under .NET 4.0 when you change the app.config file and add
<configuration><startup><supportedRuntime version="v4.0"/></startup></configuration>
you can convince them to use .NET 4.0. This will get rid of all hard disc accesses to the .NET 2.0 dlls which can cost you several seconds of hard disc access time. Another issue is SQL server. Here is a slide which I have shamelessly copied from Analysis at Scale.
This is real world data from over 50 000 computers. After seeing this graph I immediately changed my SQL Server instance to delayed boot so it gets out of the way of the other stuff which needs my hard disc more at this time. If you are working on a Laptop with a slow hdd and you go green with envy when you see how much faster your colleagues can work with their "old" desktop PCs. Here is a graph which shows boot time depending on the used hard disc:
If you need more proof why your money is well spent on a new SSD for your boot drive you can show this to your boss. It does really make a huge difference no only during boot time. What I really found fascinating in the On/Off Transition video is that there are companies out there which have Windows machines which need two hours to boot, and they were ok with that. Well not entirely. Finally they called in MS support to check their machines and they applied a hotfix to reduce the boot time from 2h down to 8 minutes. A few tweaks later they were down to two minutes. But the most shocking fact was that their workaround was that one member of the staff needed to arrive two hours earlier than all other ones to boot up all office machines. Incredible. I wonder if the company is still in business if they have equivalent efficient business processes…