Kurt Shintaku's Blog

1. Turn on verbose security status messages.  Depending on where your slowdown in the boot/login process is, verbose status messages can help you understand what process is taking so long during the boot/login cycle.  Note that this will display messages for startup and shutdown, logon and logoff.
   – Open your registry and find or create this key:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE: SOFTWARE -> Microsoft -> Windows -> CurrentVersion -> Policies -> System
   – To enable verbose status messages, create a new DWORD value called "verbosestatus" and set it to "1". (verbosestatus REG_DWORD 0x00000001 (1))
   – An additional value called "DisableStatusMessages" forces status messages to be disabled, make sure this value does not exist or is set to "0". (DisableStatusMessages REG_DWORD 0x00000000 (0))
   – Restart Windows for the change to take effect.
2. Turn off "Automatically search for network folders and printers".  This process can pause Windows for a while and can be an annoyance. 
   – Go to Control Panel->Folder Options->View tab->
   – Uncheck "Automatically search for network folders and printers"
3. Turn on boot logging.  This literally lists out every process that is run during
   Go to the My Computer>Tools>Folder Options>View tab and select "Show hidden files and folders" and then uncheck "Hide protected operating system files". Then go to the root folder of the C: drive and find the boot.ini file. Open it up in Notepad and add " /sos /bootlog" without the quotes after " /fastdetect". That will show drivers as they are loaded and will create a boot log each time the machine is started called Ntbtlog.txt and which lives in the %Systemroot%Windows folder. The boot log will almost certainly show where the hang is occurring.
4. Run Bootvis.exe.  Bootvis provides "boot visability" and provides visual graphs of what processes are run or loaded during boot, what order these processes are run, and how long each process takes.  It will also optimize the organization of the drivers to load in the most optimal fashion process.  While this will not likely diminish the large problem of boot time it will most certainly help you identify the specific driver or service that is causing you pain. 
   Many people will find that MRXSMB.SYS is a process that takes up a lot of time – usually around 2 minutes.  Points #2, #5, and #6 are important to resolving this issue.
5. Clear out Network Places.  This is a common problem – if you have cached locations listed in Network Places, these can cause boot time hangs in login when the system attempts to verify their presence on the network.  This is usually a process that takes exactly 2 minutes.
   Go to Start -> Network Places.  Highlight and delete all the links listed here.
6. Delete & Defrag.  Clearing out disk space is probably the #1 thing a person can do to increase their performance overall – not just boot time.  Most people simply don’t understand that the disk needs free space on it – a LOT – for Windows or any operating system to operate efficiently.  This is the inherent nature of random access storage… but most people think that "because I have a 40GB drive, I can store 40GB of data on it."  This is true – but not without a performance penalty.  Generally, make sure you have at least 15-20% of the drive empty at all times – don’t believe me?  Take a look at a really slow running system and check how much space is left on it.  Use a tool like CCleaner (www.ccleaner.com) to clear our temp files and cached files to start.  Also pick up a copy of a commercial disk defragmentation product and defrag your hard disk – first reorganize and system files and directory entries.

UPDATE:  4/21/2006:   So out of the blue, I get an email from Raxco, the maker of Perfect Disk, another commerical Windows disk defragmentation product.  Apparently one of their engineers somehow found my blog and noticed I’d originally mentioned Executive Software’s Diskeeper but not Raxco’s Perfect Disk and subsequently wrote a fairly long mail about Bootvis.exe, the role of defrag products in optimization, and what Raxco’s value was in comparison to Diskeeper. 

Admittedly, I technically should have just written the words, "commerical disk defragmentation product" instead of "Diskeeper 10" (I’ve since changed the wording in this blog entry above) but let’s be honest:  Both of you guys (my customers, for those of you reading this blog that aren’t one of my customers) have existing relationships with Executive Software account sales reps so I didn’t think this was going to be an issue.

In Raxco’s defense however, I’ve heard really good things about Perfect Disk from several other Microsoft engineers and they are in fact a really good partner of ours so in the spirit of fairness, here’s a pointer to their product as well in case you’re interested.  (I’m also going to post the content of some of their explanation of how system file ordering can be optimized using their product which might be interesting to some of you.)

Raxco’s Perfect Disk 7.0 – http://www.raxco.com

And here’s a link to Diskeeper’s web site:
Executive Software’s Diskeeper 10 – http://www.diskeeper.com