[bphlpt]

I'm not an expert in this area such as Andre is, but it might be along the lines of what you implied at the end of your post. MS changed some things around compared to earlier versions of Windows to improve the user's "experience". They made the desktop appear quicker, even though it was still busy starting services, background programs, etc. So maybe the counting doesn't end until the desktop is usable rather than just visible? That could explain why your stopwatch, based on what was visible, was off compared to what was reported. I would think that the optimization was meant to improve the measurement to usability, but with MS you never can be sure.

Cheers and Regards

[compsavvy]

@magicandre
Thanks. Will try and reply with results

[LemonJuice]

bphlpt, on 22 May 2012 - 02:51 AM, said:

I'm not an expert in this area such as Andre is, but it might be along the lines of what you implied at the end of your post. MS changed some things around compared to earlier versions of Windows to improve the user's "experience".

I was implying something different at the end of my last post - I meant that sometimes windows takes longer to boot than usual because it has some extra tasks to perform like install an update or run some maintenance task. Maybe that first boot that was measured by xbootmgr was longer because of that, I didn't measure it with my stopwatch so I can't tell. But 55s was certainly not the usual boot time I experienced every day.

bphlpt, on 22 May 2012 - 02:51 AM, said:

They made the desktop appear quicker, even though it was still busy starting services, background programs, etc.

From my observation this was somewhat improved after win XP. I remember this was more of a problem in XP where I had to wait a minute or longer after seeing the desktop until it actually becomes responsive. In win 7 more services seem to start before the desktop appears so the waiting for responsiveness isn't that long - I'm not an expert on this but these are my observations.

bphlpt, on 22 May 2012 - 02:51 AM, said:

So maybe the counting doesn't end until the desktop is usable rather than just visible? That could explain why your stopwatch, based on what was visible, was off compared to what was reported.

I also thought it could be like this but my observations seem to suggest Andre was right that the measurement stops when the desktop appears - not when all services and startup programs are loaded. The final xbootmgr report of 20s matches my stopwatch when I stop measuring just when the desktop appears, and certainly it is before all startup programs are loaded.

bphlpt, on 22 May 2012 - 02:51 AM, said:

I would think that the optimization was meant to improve the measurement to usability, but with MS you never can be sure.

I don't think it would be easy to accurately measure when the moment of 'usability' happens since different services/programs start at different points in time (some are delayed, etc.), some are heavy on CPU usage while others have almost no impact running in the background so I guess it's much better to measure until desktop appearance since this is some definite point objectively.

But as I said earlier after the desktop appears it takes about 5s for my system to be responsive - I can't tell if it's 100% responsive but I can start Explorer and other programs right away without any delays and xbootmgr optimization didn't change that. I could believe if there was some 5-10s. improvement in starting up background services that don't affect performance much but the results suggest that the boot time went from 55 to 20s! This is a huge difference and I'm sure it wouldn't go unnoticed. Therefore I assume that either xbootmgr measured time incorrectly or that first boot took unusually long for whatever reasons. I believe xbootmgr might have optimized something but it hasn't affected my system much - certainly not more than 1 or 2s.

[terdiam]

Nice tutorial, this make 10ms my boot faster.

I added this tutorial to my blog

[MagicAndre1981]

terdiam, on 22 May 2012 - 12:06 PM, said:

Nice tutorial, this make 10ms my boot faster.

10ms or 10s? 10ms would be a small improvement