Last week we reported that Iolo Technologies maker of System Mechanic stated they found Windows 7 to boot slower than Windows Vista. Not by a second either, by a whopping 42 percent! We found it rather hard to believe although we hadn't really analysed the situation ourselves. _____________________ Channel Web have an interesting follow up to this story - they tested the claims by running System Mechanic themselves: Prior to installing System Mechanic, the average boot-up time, from pressing the machine's Power button to being able to execute a command on the desktop, was 53 seconds. Keep in mind that this also includes the time it takes to log into a Windows domain. After installing System Mechanic, the software requires an analysis of the system. After analyzing our machine, System Mechanic detected several problems lowering system health and security: Windows Firewall disabled, 11 repairable security vulnerabilities, 71 registry problems, 55.62 MB of system clutter and two unnecessary startup items. For this initial test, we decided not to do the recommended configuration changes that System Mechanic reported, but we did select "Optimize Windows Startup." You can choose "Quick," "Deep" or "Custom Optimization;" we selected "Deep." After a forced reboot (by the way, the system took much, much longer to shut down at this point than prior to optimizing Windows startup) we again timed boot-up. At this point, our system took an average of 54 seconds to boot, one second longer than before we had System Mechanic installed and optimizing our startup. We went back into System Mechanic after boot-up and this time we selected "Let System Mechanic repair all problems." Boot time afterward for our Windows 7 system averaged 55 seconds -- 2 seconds longer than before this System Mechanic configuration change. Next, we manually selected PC Accelerator, a tool within the program and followed System Mechanic's further recommended options. We allowed the software to defrag the registry and hard drives and to recover and defrag system memory. Upon boot-up, System Mechnic's defrag process extended boot-up time to 2 minutes, 15 seconds. Knowing this was probably just a part of the initial process after our settings changes, we rebooted and the boot time was back to 54 seconds. Overall, we found that on our system, System Mechanic did not improve the boot time and, in fact, slowed it down. _____________________ So there you have it, seems it is best just letting Windows handle its own boot up - of course if any of you guys have found other applications that actually work, then let us all know. Allan Campbell: Heaven Media
Considering the random factor in the booting process, a human responding to the appearance of the login screen and typing in his password (and I'm not sure how deterministic the process of logging on to a domain is), and the accuracy of the measurement which is 1s (or a bit greater if they used a stop watch, but because of the time of human reaction, again it's not too accurate), I'd say that the variation in times is within the margin of error. Still, it's pretty safe to conclude that the tool doesn't accelerate the boot process as it is advertised.
The didn't measure boot speed the way Iolo wanted them to, which is until CPU activity dies down after boot. Which is complete nonsense, IMO, but might have resulted in a change.
stupid test in my opinion ... but nonetheless I enjoy being right (about those stupid "startup boosting" applications) they really DO make things slower. Windows 7 boots up super-fast as it is - it's once you start installing random junk that it slows down (much like XP and Vista did) The idea is to get a good Antivirus program ... one that doesn't take a long time to start.
Buy our tool, it does nothing, but we will put out a press release making it look like it does something simply to try and sell something that does nothing. Sounds like digital bottled water to me.
yep what's more, I had checked out reviews for some Vista tools and some of them DISABLED SUPERFETCH ! ridiculous.
