Diagnosing slow Windows 7 boot times

To see what your machine is doing during boot up, use the tool xperfboot.exe from the Windows SDK or as a download from the Windows Performance Analysis Developer Centre.

Run this command:

xbootmgr –trace rebootCycle -resultPath %temp%\boot

This will reboot your machine twice.

xperfview can then be used to view the output:

xperfview %temp%\boot\boot_BASE+CSWITCH_1.etl