Richard chats with Microsoft Premier Field Engineer Jeff Stokes about his tools and techniques for improving boot performance. Jeff points out that it doesn't matter what version of Windows you're using, all of them can suffer from bad boot performance for a variety of reasons, including third party tools, logon scripts and even group policy.

The first tool on the list for diagnosing boot performance problems is xperf, specifically xbootmgr which is part of xperf. You can get xperf at the Windows Performance Analysis Development Center. xperf is great for all sorts of performance analysis beyond boot performance, and Jeff also points out the codeplex project xperf123 for making using xperf a whole bunch easier.

Jeff also points to Troubleshooting Group Policy Using Event Logs, using Netsh Commands for Network Trace, Richard chats with Microsoft Premier Field Engineer Jeff Stokes about his tools and techniques for improving boot performance. Jeff points out that it doesn't matter what version of Windows you're using, all of them can suffer from bad boot performance for a variety of reasons, including third party tools, logon scripts and even group policy.

The first tool on the list for diagnosing boot performance problems is xperf, specifically xbootmgr which is part of xperf. You can get xperf at the Windows Performance Analysis Development Center. xperf is great for all sorts of performance analysis beyond boot performance, and Jeff also points out the codeplex project xperf123 for making using xperf a whole bunch easier.

Jeff also points to Troubleshooting Group Policy Using Event Logs, using Netsh Commands for Network Trace, Microsoft Network Monitor 3.4, Microsoft Exchange Server Error Code Look-up (which is good for all sorts of error codes, not just Exchange) and of course, Windows Sysinternals as all tools to help you diagnose your boot performance.

Jeff mentions Justin Halls' article on Tools for Troubleshooting slow boots and slow logons. And don't forget to check out Jeff's blog Dude where's my PFE? and Yong Rhee's blog The troubleshooters and problem solvers for even more information!