Raymond.CC Blog

When I was very young with computers was very uncommon and still very new to me, I only had a NEC 386 computer and my cousin already had Intel Pentium 100MHz and above. My cousin was comparing the boot up speed among other school friends that has a computer. Measuring the computer boot time may seemed easy by simply using a watch and monitoring the second needle ticking. Today there are software that help user check their Windows boot speed and giving even more accurate results.

I found 2 free application called BootRacer and 3DP Bench which can be used to measure computer and Windows boot time. Although calculating boot time may seem very basic but I have tested both software and they gave a very different result.


The more popular application would be BootRacer because it has been covered by many tech blogs. It claims to be able to measure the time to logon and time to desktop giving you boot speed rating. BootRacer’s method of measuring the Windows boot time is by making sure that the System Idle Process that you see in Windows Task Manager remains at 99% for 10 seconds to determine that all startup application has been fully loaded, then it can be considered as desktop time.

As for 3DP Bench, it measures bootup, shutdown and reboot time ignoring whether the startup application has been fully loaded or not. The Reboot time seemed accurate if I tally it with a clock timer but the bootup and shutdown time is not very accurate. My test computer took 8 seconds to shut down but 3DP Bench tells me that it took 18.770 seconds and as for bootup time, it took more than 30 seconds but 3DP Bench reported 16.629 seconds.

I believe that the recorded shutdown and bootup time are approximate because the benchmark software gets terminated when Windows is shutdown and will only run when Windows is loaded. The time taken for BIOS Power-On Self Test and windows loading screen can never be measured accurately by software. As for some other Windows boot analyzer shareware such as BootLog XP and WinBootInfo which provides a more accurate result because it installs a service that starts up before any other application so that it can record the time taken to load every startup process in Windows.

As for 3DP Bench and BootRacer, my personal opinion on them are they are somehow flawed and doesn’t really provide an accurate result for measuring the Windows startup and shutdown time because it uses approximate timing for some part of the calculation.