Using BOOTVIS

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)

Difficulty: Easy

I will show you how to use Microsoft BootVis to speed up your systems bootup and shutdown times. First of all, download the latest version of Microsoft BootVis (v1.3.37.0) from here.

Now, install and run it. The opening screen is simple, and blank. To start...
STEP 1 - Ensure all of the tickboxes on the left are ticked
STEP 2 - Click on the Trace menu at the top, and choose Next Boot + Driver Delays
STEP 3 - Click OK then the Reboot Now button. When your computer restarts, do not click on anything until BootVis opens and closes (wait around 1 minute).
STEP 4 - When it has appeared and gone, re-open BootVis.
STEP 5 - Click on the Trace menu at the top again, and choose Optimise System.
STEP 6 - Click Reboot Now, and when your computer restarts, do not click on anything until BootVis opens and shows a small window explaining what it's doing. It has finished when the box closes.
All done! Your computer will now bootup (and hopefully shutdown!) quicker.