What happens during the windows boot process

It is useful to understand what happens behind the scenes when you switch on your computer from a cold idle machine to an operable and functional system. There are essentially two forms of booting - the soft boot and the hard boot. A warm boot on the other hand takes place when a software application or operating system triggers the computer to perform a reboot.

A successful boot is dependent on 3 conditions - the hardware, BIOS and operating system files to function without errors. When an error occurs, you will be notified by error messages, beeping sounds or in the worst scenario, a blank screen. Back to Top. The bootup process is a list of detailed procedures that the system undergoes to perform all system checks and load all necessary files to bring the computer to an operable state.

As soon as you power up your computer, a self-test is performed by the power supply to ensure that the volume and current levels are correct before the Power Good signal is sent to the processor. When this first stage is cleared, the microprocessor will then trigger the BIOS to perform a series of operations.

During WinLogonInit, the user logon screen appears, the service control manager starts services, and Group Policy scripts run. WinLogonInit ends when the Explorer process starts. The ExplorerInit subphase begins when Explorer. During ExplorerInit, the system creates the desktop window manager DWM process, which initializes the desktop and displays it for the first time. A detailed analysis of each phase would go far beyond the scope of this article. Common performance vulnerabilities are described in the whitepaper as well.

Still, it might require more tools like parallel network traces and additional debug logs such as Gpsvc logging to fully analyze a problem. If the WinLogonInit phase takes a long time, you can use the Winlogon graph for further analysis. In this example the Group Policy processing took around seconds to complete, before the Windows desktop could be loaded.

While the Winlogon graph does not explain why it took seconds to complete GPO processing which could be related to network issues, policy settings, GPO preferences, scripts, and so on , your can see where to investigate further. The PostBoot phase includes all background activity that occurs after the desktop is ready.

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