I want to try and measure the improvement in boot time for my PC after some remedial work. How do you know as soon as a PC has DEFINITELY finished booting? I want to be able to measure to the same boot point consistently so I know what the improvement (hopefully!).... Thanks guys.
It's difficult. You could either measure up to the point when the desktop first appears, or maybe put some startup program (eg. Notepad) in Start Menu > Programs > Startup and see when that starts up. But keep in mind that boot time is not consistent. For example every third (or was it fifth?) boot Windows performs a number of optimizations, and don't forget Superfetch and Prefetch either.
I think if your going to notice a difference its going to be a big difference. So if you just measure to a similar point, each time, like when your AV loads, or a certain icon in the task bar. Each reading may not be the same every time, but you won't really notice a small difference, if you get a big difference, you'll know you've done something right. Not sure if that makes sense, it does to me, hard to explain what I mean.
I always count from the picture of logo of motherboard's manufacturer or POST to the point that all my apps are loaded and hard drive stop making noise (u know the noise that it makes when u read data from it), this is my way to count boot up time. I always repeat this test 3 times and then take average from it
From windows load screen to idle HDD. Motherboard POST should not be measured as that stays the same no matter what you do.
Doesn't matter if you do - it's the same whatever you do, just like the core windows processes. Personally I just wait until it sounds like it's finished, doesn't necessarily mean it's done properly, just that it sounds about right.
Doesn't matter as long as you only compare your rig with itself. But the moment you want to compare your time with other people's rigs, it becomes essential IMO.
Try bootvis from microsoft if you have xp, it will give you a read out of the what takes time on boot up, i.e drivers and apps .
you can change motherboard boot times - optimize bios (disable parralel/serial ports) set fast boot.. that sorta stuff.
as somebody mentioned before if u only comparing your own boot times then it doesn't matter how u do it, the only thing that matters is that you do it exactly the same everytime, start counting from the same point and finish at the same point. It's getting more complicated if you want to compare your results with someone else EDIT: this bootvis app is looking interesting
