Boot Chart for Windows

Boot Chart offers a great way to view detailed startup statistics, but newbies won't be able to do much with it. Most of the details will be hard to find and even harder to decipher for anyone who doesn't know what they're doing. However, it's a neat tool for benchmarkers or other computer gearheads.

This app doesn't download as a traditional program, but an application you can stick on a portable drive and take anywhere. It's very light at only 57KB. It searches for event trace logs to analyze, but you have to already have them on your computer. It compiles your statistics so you can see how long it took your computer to boot, what things are running at startup, and other details. It charts all of this relevant information for you on graphs, as well. Sadly, Boot Chart doesn't tell you where to find the files it reads, so you have to go hunting for them on your own. The program's layout seems like it was made for Windows XP, but it makes all of the details the program collects really easy to read. It's a neat app, but it makes you do all the work if you want to speed things up, which is what most people will want in the first place.

If you need to see benchmarks for a part or find out other minute details about your startup, Boot Chart is a nifty, fast way to do it. However, if you're just getting started with high-performance upgrading, you might want to leave this app alone for a little while.