Tips&Tricks – Trace and Analyze Windows Boot and Shutdown with Windows Performance Toolkit

Although most of us know Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit (ADK) for the..Deployment part, there is another great tool there called Windows Performance Toolkit.

This tool can help IT Administrators to analyze performance data in a very practical way using a graphical user interface that really simplifies reading the collected traces.

It’s specially useful when we need to troubleshooting boot or shutdown times.

After installing the tool it’s super easy to start using it to analyze a machine.

Here are some simple command-lines to startup (attention that all commands are case sensitive):

Boot Tracing
xbootmgr –trace boot –traceFlags BASE+CSWITCH+DRIVERS+POWER –resultPath C:\YourPath

Shutdown Tracing
xbootmgr –trace shutdown –noPrepReboot –traceFlags BASE+CSWITCH+DRIVERS+POWER –resultPath C:\YourPath

The above command will generate a the trace files that you can analyze to troubleshoot for example a long boot, and see if the issue is caused by any driver, software, service, etc.

For a very nice, complete and very very informative article about Windows Performance Toolkit please read the following post from MSFN website:
MSFN - Trace Windows 7 boot/shutdown/hibernate/standby/resume issues