In this day and age you would be amazed at the number of times I still have to optimize WinXP for different clients. One of the most common complaints is slow startup times (still!). You can do a bit of analysis yourself with the cloud/crowd sourcing soluto (www.soluto.com), but sometimes a more thorough analysis is required. This tip from ars technica several years ago has often helped me.
Before attempting to use Bootvis to analyze or optimize the boot performance of your system, make sure that the task scheduler service has been enabled ? the program requires the service to run properly. Also, close all open programs as well ? using the software requires a reboot.
To use the software to optimize your system startup, first start with a full analysis of a fresh boot. Start Bootvis, go to the Tools menu, and select next boot. Set the Trace Repetition Settings to 2 repetitions, Start at 1, and Reboot automatically. Then set the trace into motion. The system will fully reboot twice, and then reopen bootvis and open the second trace file (should have _2 in the name). Analyze the graphs and make any changes that you think are necessary (this is a great tool for determining which startup programs you want to kill using msconfig). Once you have made your optimizations go to the Trace menu, and select the Optimize System item. This will cause the system to reboot and will then make some changes to the file structure on the hard drive (this includes a defragmentation of boot files and a shifting of their location to the fastest portion of the hard disk, as well as some other optimizations). After this is done, once again run a Trace analysis as above, except change the starting number to 3. Once the system has rebooted both times, compare the charts from the second trace to the charts for the fourth trace to show you the time improvement of the system’s boot up.
The standard defragmenter included with Windows XP will not undo the boot optimizations performed by this application.
via Windows XP Tweaking—Startup and General Performance Tweaks.
