Hey Fred

[Charger440]

It's awful quiet in here, give us an update on what's going on in your world. We like to be kept in the loop on the cool things you're working on. Plus we miss having you around.

[Fred]

Hi Jim.

I've been quite busy as always. I actually had an announcement to post, and since you asked, why not here?

Most of my repairs consist of cleanup and optimization. On slow machines I always recommend replacing the mechanic HDD with an SSD but customers aren't always willing to spend 150€ in a repair.

Anyway, I figured hybrid shutdown is the main culprit of slow Windows 8/10 reboot. Because hybrid shutdown is not a real shutdown (it's more like hibernation), the system rarely reboots, and thus boot tracing optimization is almost never performed. So, with time machines start taking longer to reboot, instead of improving like they did on Windows 7.

My cleanup and optimization procedure always consists of rebooting a few times, while leaving the machine on a few minutes between each reboot so that boot tracing and optimization can be automatically performed by the system. But that may be time consuming, so I figured I needed a tool for the effect. Sometimes after rebooting the customized layout of the desktop icons is lost, so I thought the tool also needed to be able to save and restore the position of all the desktop icons.

And that's how MRS (Multiple Reboot Scheduler) was born. I've also been working in another new tool, and I'll talk about it soon. Let me know your thoughts.

mrs.png (49.18 KiB) Viewed 17310 times

[wmmiller]

Hi Fred,

You are so right about people not wanting to spend the money on a solid state drive. I now have a solid state in all my computers except one and it really makes a difference. Although they all have a regular drive where most files are stored except the one I mentioned and my Dell Inspiron Mini that I use when I’m at the clinic but it does have a solid state. I always disable hybrid shutdown for the same reasons you mention. Computers need a good reboot to keep them working better. Did you reboot is the first question I ask when someone calls with an issue. I’m proud to say that my kids now tell me that they rebooted before I even ask. I’ve drilled it into their heads.

When will this tool be online?

Bill

[Charger440]

First thoughts are, I like it.

I would recommend anyone that comes into my office get a SSD. They exponentially faster than a spinning drive. However it's hard to convince them to replace their "perfectly fine" drive with a new one.

Forgive the stupidity here but, what is Boot tracing optimization?

As far as I am aware, a reboot tool is something UVK has been missing a long time and from that aspect I think this a welcome tool. Particularly because you can how many times and how long to wait between. The backing up the icon locations may pretty handy as well as you very well know (since you made the app) desktop icons do tend to wonder from time to time.

I personally don't like hybrid boot so I disable it a lot. Not all the time but fairly regular I do.

[Fred]

Bill, the new tool should be available in a few days. Coding is almost ready, then a few days debugging should be enough. It will be available as a standalone app and will also be part of UVK and TTS.

Jim, Boot tracing optimization is part of the Superfetcher feature introduced in Windows Vista. Although there's no documentation about it, I guess it was based of an old tool from XP days: BootVis.

As you certainly recall, BootVis was able to monitor the Windows boot and determine which files took longer to load. It also allowed to defrag the boot files and reboot several times. It was a great tool

One of the things Boot tracing does is check which files are loaded during boot, and put them in the fastest part of the hard disk drive. But I'm sure it does many other things, because we can see great improvement in SSD disks too by rebooting several times.

[Charger440]

Yep I remember that tool. In researching what you was referring too, I found this that I thought was interesting as well.

https://helgeklein.com/blog/2013/07/ana ... -analyzer/

It's either the new version of what you refer or directly related to it. At any rate, I am glad to have the multiple reboot ability added to UVK, It will be nice feature to have.

[Fred]

So it seems to be working properly. Here's the download link. I'll be writing the related web pages today. Let me know if you guys find any bugs.

[wmmiller]

Fred,

I just ran this using version is 1.0.1.0. When it’s done it doesn’t revert back to asking for the user password. Auto login continues. When I go to add a user password it knows there is one and asks for the current password before being able to enter/change the password. Otherwise it seems to work as intended.

Bill

[Charger440]

Are you sure your times are accurate? According to this it took 10 minutes for a core i7 to boot.

[Fred]

Bill, I'll see if can make it revert the auto-logon after the reboot sequence, if it was not previously enabled. Thanks for the suggestion.

Jim, It measures the local time since MRS shuts the machine down until it is launched after booting up. So it is not just the boot time. It's the shutdown time + BIOS time + boot time + User logon time. If you had to enter the user logon password during the reboot, that time is accounted too.

[Trajet]

I used the MRS for the first time yesterday. I backup desktop icons. when the MRS was finished, the desktop icons were all back to the left of the screen. I tried a number of times to restore the icons using MRS but all I get is flashing of the icons for ages (I left it overnight) only to find that MRS keeps crashing whilst trying to restore the icons. I am using Windows 10 64bit Version 1703 Build 15063.850