BootRacer

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on November 02, 2011

BootRacer is a free utility that measures how long it takes your PC to boot up and saves it in an archive. You can use it to compare boot times when you make changes, such as removing programs from your startup file. It doesn't display your boot record, though it does measure Time to Logon, Logon to Desktop, and other increments. It writes events to the standard event log, which you can view with Windows Event Viewer. It can't make any changes to your system that affect your boot time, but it will try to get you to buy software that can. However, that doesn't stop you from making your own changes to your boot sequence in the Windows System Configuration tool and using BootRacer to test and compare their effects.

BootRacer's ultrasimple interface offers a minimum of controls: just Start, Advanced, and Exit buttons to the side, and two more buttons labeled Speed my PC and Show History beneath. Under Advanced, we could access a manual, get support, and access the options, most of which apply to how BootRacer behaves when your system starts. We made our selections and closed any other programs we had opened since BootRacer needed to reboot our system to do its thing. We rebooted, and BootRacer tracked our boot time with an onscreen display. When our system had finished booting, BootRacer displayed our current boot results on its main page, including Time to Logon and Time to Desktop. Clicking Show History opened a table recording our boot event and displaying its duration in seconds and on a bar graph. With BootRacer enabled, each subsequent boot was recorded, enabling us to compare each startup event. Clicking Speed up PC took us to a link to download a system cleaner.

Though you can use BootRacer just for fun, it provides an overview of your startup time that's easier to use than the Event Viewer, which is great for making quick checks of any changes you make to your system.