[Ed. Note: I’ve had this article sitting in my Windows Live Writer drafts folder forever waiting to be published. I don’t know who to attribute this to because I’ve long lost the original creator (apologies), but props to whoever it was that originally figured this out. That being said, it’s about slow startup and shutdown times for Windows Vista SP1.]
Q: Have you noticed a degradation in startup & shutdown times of your Windows Vista SP1 workstation?
Basically, by applying the changes below, many folks have seen their startup and shutdown times increase by a factor of 2. when using Windows Vista SP1.
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CORRUPT READYBOOT MANIFEST
It turns out the issue has something to do with having a corrupt ReadyBoot plan that isn’t reconfiguring itself correctly post-application of Service Pack 1. If you examine %SystemRoot%PrefetchReadyboot you’ll find trace files (.fx) that may be outdated – all the way back to a time prior to the application of Service Pack 1 on your machine.
This is because if you make any major changes to your systems configuration, you’re supposed to blank the WindowsPrefetch directory on the system drive to clear out any stale prefetch data that no longer applies to the new system configuration. Technically, we have this documented in an OEM performance whitepaper, but it certainly isn’t something that the average Joe would know to do after applying Service Pack 1.
NEED TO CYCLE MULTIPLE TIMES TO RELEARN
Doing this of course will ‘clear’ Windows Vista’s understanding of what sort of files it should prefetch off disk into memory to enhance performance of the system, but over time, it’ll relearn this. Now in the case of Startup & Shutdown times you should be able to simply clear WindowsPrefetchReadyboot and be fine.
Cycling through a proper startup and shutdown multiple times (3-4) at this point should allow the prefetcher to know what files are important at boot time to improve performance gradually.
Personally, this has VERY noticeably sped up my startup & shutdown performance. Hope it does the same for you.
Kurt Shintaku's Blog 