14 DAY TRIAL // MaaS360 Boot Analyzer is a simple instrument tailored for your need to learn about your system’s boot times in an easy and effortless fashion. When enabled it will simply pop on your desktop the moment the boot completes, showing the duration of the entire procedure.
Although this sort of information is available in the modern Windows editions, pulling up the performance diagnostics sheet in Event Viewer takes a while. Some more time is spent on waiting for the information to load as well.
With MaaS360 Boot Analyzer things are much simpler as the application is designed for the sole purpose of giving you boot timings of the system. To be more specific, it records the time the system needs to become useable and responsive to your commands.
The freebie installs in a blink and does not pose any trouble during the process. It comes with a very straightforward interface, which shows boot times in an easy to interpret chart; the horizontal axis displays the day and month of the event while the vertical one stands for the time recorded to complete the boot. Each event is marked with a crosshair.
Although the design of the interface is simple and clear-cut, the boot time history line could use some smoothing up.
Glancing over the chart gives you a general look at how boot times vary, but for specific information on the procedure take a look in the lower part of the application window. As mentioned earlier Boot Analyzer records the time elapsed from the start of the operating system until the desktop is ready.
This is calculated from the moment Windows starts loading (immediately after the BIOS POST routine), the moment Windows starts loading. This information is extracted directly from Windows via a WMI command. The stop time of the procedure is marked when Boot Analyzer succeeds in simulating the opening a large file, which is included in the installation folder of the program. The simulation begins after all startup services and processes have been initiated by the operating system.
During our evaluation we compared the results in MaaS360 Boot Analyzer with what Windows recorded. The differences between the two sources were pretty steep, generating gaps of up to 40 seconds in some cases.
However, an explanation for these inconsistencies would be that Windows continues to load startup processes and services after Boot Analyzer file opening simulation completes.
Besides providing the last boot duration, the lower part of the application window also shows statistics on the average duration, displays the best, the worst result recorded and standard deviation. These make for useful details if you need cold numbers to show boot duration depreciation or improvement.
All these numbers can be represented in the graph. However, even if each of the values comes with a different type of line, adding making available all this info in the chart makes interpretation quite confusing, especially when there aren’t large fluctuations between the boot events.
By default, MaaS360 Boot Analyzer records boot interval whenever the user starts the machine. The data collected this way can be pretty insightful on the long run. But if you want to see how a new startup item influences boot duration the app carries a test option, which allows you to set automatic system restarts (up to 10).
According to the documentation of the program it can save up to 100 results (we did not test it beyond the 25 limit). You will not be able to view all 100 results in the graph, as the maximum number imposed by the developer is 50 and there is no possibility to resize the interface, but you can export them to a CSV file.
The report contains only the date of the boot, the OS start time, the time the desktop became ready and the calculated boot duration in seconds.
Compared to the amount of information provided by Windows’ tool, MaaS360 Boot Analyzer is definitely a lighter application, but it compensates through ease of use and the possibility to compile average results from the tests in the graphic.
Still as a difference from the internal measurement in Microsoft’s OS, Boot Analyzer does not count the total duration required for the system to be 100% ready. However, during our tests we noticed that the same fluctuations were present both in Window’s logs as well in Boot Analyzer.
It allows you to start a 10 restart loop test and automatically calculates the average of the results displayed in the graphic. You can easily pick the slowest and fastest boot durations from the Boot Time chart. Export function allows you to export all results to a CSV file. You can configure it to notify you when boot times increase all of a sudden beyond a user-defined value (displayed in seconds or percentage). Some may argue that the results are shown in seconds when milliseconds would be a more accurate information, but this is not a tool for measurements that precise. The application is a great instrument to create boot time statistics with no real effort from the user. It can perform automated tests to collect data right after a modification, or let it gather info each time you start the system.
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