From: Jose on
On May 15, 2:20 pm, "Bill P" <Bi...(a)nospam.invalid> wrote:
> Snipped
>
> "If you want to get smart about what happens when your system boots,
> read this article:
>
> http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb457123.aspx
>
> Stop guessing and just trying things that might work maybe and start
> measuring and you will have better results.
>
> Thanks Jose I will check out the article. I did start another thread
> regarding hibernating rather than shutting down and that is what I am doing
> at the moment. The resume time from hibernation is incredibly fast.
> Regards Bill

I have turned into a chronic hibernator as well. It always had a bad
rap with me for some reason but I have zero problems with it and use
it all the time. One thing about hibernate I did not know was that if
you power up from hibernation and don't "do" anything, by default XP
will resume hibernation by itself in exactly 300 seconds (5 minutes).
There is also a definition for doing something. I could not figure
out why when I powered up after hibernate and came back later a few
minutes later, my machine had turned itself off...

Add a fourth Hibernate button to your Turn Off Computer options as
well (Hibernate, Stand By, Turn Off, Restart). One less key stroke
for me!

Try the Bootlog XP tool too! If Bootvis won't run, fix things so it
does. It will show you may things that start up h ow long they take,
etc. when you boot and some research will show you that you don't need
many of them - at all. Then you can remove them from your startup
items. This invalidates the trial and error advice you may also read
about.
From: Twayne on
In news:b2bd11c9-cb05-460e-89ed-fcd6cc36d42d(a)c13g2000vbr.googlegroups.com,
Jose <jose_ease(a)yahoo.com> typed:
....

>
> Try the Bootlog XP tool too! If Bootvis won't run, fix
> things so it does. It will show you may things that start
> up h ow long they take, etc. when you boot and some
> research will show you that you don't need many of them -
> at all. Then you can remove them from your startup items.
> This invalidates the trial and error advice you may also
> read about.

Hmm, thanks Jose, for the Bootlog XP tool hint; if it does what it says it
does, that's going to be what I've been looking for for a long time.

Twayne


From: Jose on
On May 16, 3:32 pm, "Twayne" <nob...(a)spamcop.net> wrote:
> Innews:b2bd11c9-cb05-460e-89ed-fcd6cc36d42d(a)c13g2000vbr.googlegroups.com,
> Jose <jose_e...(a)yahoo.com> typed:
> ...
>
>
>
> > Try the Bootlog XP tool too!  If Bootvis won't run, fix
> > things so it does.  It will show you may things that start
> > up h ow long they take, etc. when you boot and some
> > research will show you that you don't need many of them -
> > at all.  Then you can remove them from your startup items.
> > This invalidates the trial and error advice you may also
> > read about.
>
> Hmm, thanks Jose, for the Bootlog XP tool hint; if it does what it says it
> does, that's going to be what I've been looking for for a long time.
>
> Twayne

What have you discovered, Twayne?

If Bootlog XP is not what you are looking for, describe what it does
not do and your requirements/needs - I may have other things up my
sleeve.

Are you able to run Bootvis as well?
From: Twayne on
In news:d91b6406-b9fa-4cb1-9fa6-0968f54a17db(a)c11g2000vbe.googlegroups.com,
Jose <jose_ease(a)yahoo.com> typed:
> On May 16, 3:32 pm, "Twayne" <nob...(a)spamcop.net> wrote:
>> Innews:b2bd11c9-cb05-460e-89ed-fcd6cc36d42d(a)c13g2000vbr.googlegroups.com,
>> Jose <jose_e...(a)yahoo.com> typed:
>> ...
>>
>>
>>
>>> Try the Bootlog XP tool too! If Bootvis won't run, fix
>>> things so it does. It will show you may things that start
>>> up h ow long they take, etc. when you boot and some
>>> research will show you that you don't need many of them -
>>> at all. Then you can remove them from your startup items.
>>> This invalidates the trial and error advice you may also
>>> read about.
>>
>> Hmm, thanks Jose, for the Bootlog XP tool hint; if it does
>> what it says it does, that's going to be what I've been
>> looking for for a long time.
>>
>> Twayne
>
> What have you discovered, Twayne?

Actually, I like it. It's not as easy to read as bootvis; seems like less
detail where I could zoom way in to a time period and fill screen width with
it to add detail. But, beggers can't be choosers! I can sure live with it!

>
> If Bootlog XP is not what you are looking for, describe
> what it does not do and your requirements/needs - I may
> have other things up my sleeve.

Ideally, I'd like to see what the actual activity is on the cpu but that's
more a wish than a need. e.g. A service/program that takes 30 S to get
loaded didn't actually get 100% of the cpu time for 30S because the cpu was
off "chunking" pieces of other programs at the same time it was doing that
one 30S load.

I believe boot Log is capable of what I wanted; see who starts/stops when,
etc..

>
> Are you able to run Bootvis as well?

No, not since I've installed SP3. It doesn't trash or freeze anything but
its own data, but it fails to complete the tasks. I've seen a couple of
machines where it worked with SP3, one of them a Dell, but for the most part
all reports seem to indicate it just falls down with SP3. It was OK back as
SP2. So in all, I've tested bootvis on an SP1/2 machine upped to SP3 and
this Dell with SP3 on the original XP disk with same results each time. I
tried McIntyre's version too, supposedly an updated bootvis version, but no
such luck.

This is a relatively new Dell T3400 P4/4Gig RAM downgraded from wiin7 to
XP Pro Workstation machine and I have had the "pleasure" of manually
building the OS twice: Once as soon as it arrived to get rid of all the junk
and be sure I had all the discs I needed, and again later when I discovered
my images were infected several dates back so rather than trust an image I
rebuilt it manually again and tossed out the images and started over again.
Have never installed the win7 discs so know nothing there. Someday I'll dual
boot it.

HTH, & thanks again,

Twayne`


From: SC Tom on
Jose wrote:
> On May 14, 4:04 am, "Bill P" <Bi...(a)nospam.invalid> wrote:
>> Thanks Twayne. I tried Bootvis but it did nothing for my setup (XP
>> SP3)
>>
>> Bill
>>
>> "Twayne" <nob...(a)spamcop.net> wrote in message
>>
>> news:eEGbt1s8KHA.4604(a)TK2MSFTNGP04.phx.gbl...
>>
>>
>>
>>> Innews:Oe1lfqb8KHA.3840(a)TK2MSFTNGP02.phx.gbl,
>>> Bill P <Bi...(a)nospam.invalid> typed:
>>>> Using win XP home sp3.
>>>> Is there an app that will time how long it takes for a
>>>> machine to boot up. Regards Bill
>>
>>> I've never found anything to rival bootvis but I can give you a
>>> head-up. Bootvis, at least in all the people I know who tried it,
>>> including myself, have found it won't work in SP3. Remember, it
>>> hasn't had any support in a long, long time.
>
> Bootvis works fine in SP3 unless your system is afflicted in some way
> that prevents it from working.
>
> If Bootvis doesn't work, you need to better define what "doesn't work"
> means. I just ran Bootvis on my XP Pro SP3 and it works fine.
>
> Another popular and revealing tool is Bootlog XP from Greatis:
>
> http://www.greatis.com/
>
> If you want to do a good job of figuring out timings and if
> adjustments you make have some influence (in any direction), you need
> to come up with something a little more scientific that looking at the
> icons and deciding when you think Windows thinks it is "ready".
> Remove subjective opinions and unmeasurable things from your analysis
> completely. There should be no guessing about anything ever. You
> need to know with 100% certainty when the boot cycle is complete with
> tenth of a second granularity to be able to see if your adjustments
> are helping or hurting things.
>
> If you are getting paid or laid to fix some system that is slow to
> boot, you need to be able to say: Before I started, it took exactly
> this long to boot and now when I am done, it takes exactly this long
> and here is what I did. You can see here after my repeatable tests
> and mesurements that things have improved by this amount of time (down
> to the tenth of a second).
>
> Then it is easy to justify your $1 a second fee for speeding up
> somebody's configuration issues because you can measure it exactly,
> give a printed report, etc. Not bad for a usually 30 second system
> analysis and "fix" of the slow boot phenomenon.
>
> You could follow the "try a clean boot state and see if your system
> boot faster" advice. Well, of course it will boot faster, but what do
> you do next? You could also try to "check msconfig for things,
> culprits and suspicious items and disabling them" or "try fiddling
> with some things".
>
> If you want to get smart about what happens when your system boots,
> read this article:
>
> http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb457123.aspx
>
> Stop guessing and just trying things that might work maybe and start
> measuring and you will have better results.

Bootvis gave me a BSOD with a 0x0000007E error on XP Home SP3. It also set
sfsync02 and sfsync03 errors in the event log. AFAIK, my system is not
"afflicted" in any way. I had to boot into safe mode, then delete Bootvis
from the Startup folder. I then booted normally and uninstalled it. But then
when I cold booted the next day, I got the same BSOD. After doing a system
restore to the time right before the initial installation, all is well.
I have no Starforce protected games on my system, and made a point over the
years of never installing one that required it after reading about all the
bad things that may happen with it. Obviously, from what I've read, it
doesn't play well with Windows all the time.
I have used Bootvis in the past, but never with SP3. I don't have a problem
with my boot time, but was curious as to what it would show after following
this thread. Guess I found out, ha ha!
--
SC Tom