Where's that 10 seconds gone?

Let me start this review by classifying myself as a fairly knowledgeable user and enthusiast. I'm not a professional, meaning I don't make my living developing, designing, working on, writing about or fixing systems.

I'm self-taught but I seem to have accumulated quite a lot of skills that unfortunately for my free time makes me the go-to guy for all friends and family (and acquaintances of both those groups) to make their systems right when they go wrong.

I need to get one of those T-shirts that says "No, I will not fix your computer".

I should also say that I'm annoyingly pedantic. I will worry away at something until it's perfect, or at least until it meets with my satisfaction. And my satisfaction is hard to meet.

OK, now that my credentials, or lack thereof, are established, let's move on. I'm running a Windows 10 system with a boot time averaging 15 seconds, the best is in the low 14s. That's a real boot time, a BootRacer boot time, something that is measured the same way each time, is repeatable and upon which you can absolutely rely for accuracy and comparison if you're tweaking things to see what a difference they make to boot times.

So what I mean is that it's not most people's idea of a boot time. If you ask a lot of people, they'll say "Ha, my W10 system boots up in 30 seconds". You ask them to show you. Start the stopwatch. Turns out you can't actually do any productive work on their computer for more like 2 minutes.

I find this all the time.

I was in a mainstream computer store the other day (I live in Sydney Australia) and the sales guy was a self-confessed nerd who pretty much thought he was only working there until the offer from MS or Google or the Big Apple came through. I was looking at some notebooks.

He came up. I commented on how slow W10 is to boot for many reasons, not the least of which is the amount of phoning-home it does.

He said "No, this is the top end HP, 512 gig SSD, 6th gen Skylake i7, 16 gig RAM, 4 gig NVIDIA etc etc blah blah ..... it'll boot up in about 10 seconds max".

So I said "Could you show me?". He said "Sure". I looked at the second hand on my watch. He turned it on.

10 seconds came and went before I could blink a few times, I counted off 30 seconds and pretty much nothing had happened beyond POST and a frenetic SSD.

45 seconds.

A minute.

He started to shuffle his feet.

I said "Where's that 10 seconds gone?" He mumbled something, I forget what but he was looking a tad sheepish. A minute ten and we have a desktop but the HDD is still going mad, green activity light LED locked on solid. Try to click an icon on the desktop to start it and you get the feeling the thing says to you "Are you kidding? I'm busy here talking to Mama in Redmond. Go have a coffee and come back later". OK, so you get the idea.

Oh, and I told the sales guy about BootRacer; he really needs it!

Of all the applications I have on all my computers .... and here I'm not talking about apps that get work done on the machine like office apps, email client, third party browsers etc, I'm talking about system apps, things that help me to make my machines better and faster so I can get that work done better and faster, which is what the computer is for after all.

And I have a lot of them, the system apps I mean, and they're all good ones because I've spent twenty years sorting the wheat from the chaff.

Anyway, of all those, BootRacer is at the top of the list of absolutely must-haves.

The best-of-the-best.

And the simplest-of-the-best.

I'm not going to go into what it does / doesn't do / how it does it / what you see / what you can and can't tweak in the Settings etc. This isn't that sort of a review. There's lots of other places you can read that stuff. Here is just one of them.

This program was written and is developed by a chap in Russia, Yaroslavl actually, a couple of hours' drive from Moscow, named Dmitry Sokolov. The company is Greatis and there's a bunch of other system apps in their stable as well as BootRacer.

All that homely stuff is irrelevant of course but the thing is that if you have a question regarding running and using BootRacer and write to Greatis tech support, Dmitry might just be the guy you hear back from if you're lucky. He's very hands-on; he loves his products and from what I can see, is pretty passionate about helping his users love his products as well. The guy is intelligent, open, and totally straight-forward. If he tells you something, you can take it to the bank.

If you want to tweak your system to improve boot times and want a consistent yardstick which will give you reliable, repeatable and consistent information on how you're doing, you need BootRacer. There's nothing else out there that does these things anywhere near as well.