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

GPOs - Black Screen After Applying Wallpaper GPO [Solved]

And after 3 days of maniac troubleshooting, googling and...1 hour of Microsoft Premier Support this one it's finally solved!

Here's a quick resume of the issue and, in my case, what was happening.

Symptom

After apply a GPO to change Windows background to a corporate wallpaper for all users, instead of the changing to the correct image, users got a black screen.

Issue/Resolution

After 3 or 4 days of troubleshooting Microsoft gave me a nice way to quickly understand if this was a problem with our image or something else.

• Get an image that originally comes with Windows, you can find them in "C:\Windows\Web\Wallpaper\".
• Now, copy the image to the same folder and the same name you've configured your GPO setting.
• Reboot the machine

Now, if the image shows up, this probably means that there's an issue with your image.

In my case, the image that was delivered was 8 bit depth instead of 24 bit depth. This caused the issue.

After converting the image to 24bit depth (with Paint.NET for example) the corporate wallpaper showed up exactly how it should!

Hope this helps people struggling with this issue!