The Windows Event Viewer logs many system events automatically. This includes installations, hardware errors and events that are important to diagnose a system. Two of those values that get recorded automatically by default are the boot performance and the shutdown performance of the Windows operating system.

The time recorded here is often more accurate than the time recorded by third party software such as Soluto, BootRacer or Boot Timer.

Event Manager

Launch the Event Manager the following way. Bring up the run box with the hotkey Windows-r, type in eventvwr and hit enter.

The program displays a tree structure in the left sidebar, the contents of the selected folder in the middle and actions on the right. I suggest you click on the hide action button in the toolbar to increase the available room.

Microsoft has changed the Event Viewer significantly for Windows Vista which means that Windows XP users will see a different layout than Vista or Windows 7 users.

The events that we want to analyze are event 100 which logs the boot performance, and event 200 which logs the shutdown performance of the Windows system.

Follow the tree structure to the following folder:

Applications and Services Log > Microsoft > Windows > Diagnostics-Performance > Operational

Windows XP users can sort the system events to find all events with the numbers 100 and 200.

The event listing list the date and time of the event, the event number and the task category. If you click on an event you see detailed information about it in the lower half of the interface. Locate the entry Boot Duration for Boot Performance events, or Shutdown Duration for Shutdown Performance events.

Divide the time by 1000 to get the boot or shutdown time in seconds. The value listed is milliseconds.

Now what can you do with the information? You could analyze boot performance optimizations for instance, or analyze the system’s boot time over time. I personally like to use the information to measure the impact of newly installed software on the system boot time.

What’s the boot duration of your computer?

You can start the Event Viewer in Windows using the keyboard shortcut [Windows R], typing [eventvwr.msc] and hitting [enter]. Navigate in the Event Manager using the menu on the left side using the following path: Applications and Services Logs => Microsoft => Windows => Diagnostics-Performance => Operational. This will lead directly to the location that contains performance diagnostics not only for the Windows shutdown but also for standby and boot performance issues.

A good way to start is to sort the columns by Task Category. Click on the Task Category title and look for Shutdown Performance Monitoring entries. Each entry will contain information about the application or process that was causing problems during shutdown including the time it took to shutdown that process. A process that takes very long to shutdown is usually the problem for the shutdown problems.

Once the process or application has been identified it is a matter of finding out why it is causing the delay. It could be outdated or incompatible with that version of Windows and to a lesser extent a faulty version or driver. A good way to start is to look for updates for that software and install those if they are available. It might be easier on the other hand to simply deactivate or uninstall the software if that is possible.