Windows: Driver for logging the timing of drivers and services at startup

Sometimes it is good to measure how long a laptop with Windows will take to boot and which drivers or services might be hogging down the boot process. There exist some ways of measuring the time using Microsoft-provided tooling but they aren't redistributable.

To overcome this limitation, I've wrote a simple driver that will write a text file with a time stamp when each other driver or service gets called. This way we can (more or less) expose which drivers or services are taking longer to be loaded.

This is a sample of what to expect:

18/02/2015 13:16:40.437, Driver, 4, \SystemRoot\System32\Drivers\crashdmp.sys
18/02/2015 13:16:40.453, Driver, 4, \SystemRoot\System32\Drivers\iaStor.sys
18/02/2015 13:16:40.453, Driver, 4, \SystemRoot\System32\Drivers\dumpfve.sys
18/02/2015 13:16:40.812, Driver, 4, \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\cdrom.sys
18/02/2015 13:16:40.812, Driver, 4, \SystemRoot\System32\Drivers\Null.SYS
18/02/2015 13:16:40.828, Driver, 4, \SystemRoot\System32\Drivers\Beep.SYS
18/02/2015 13:16:40.843, Driver, 4, \SystemRoot\System32\drivers\watchdog.sys
18/02/2015 13:16:40.843, Driver, 4, \SystemRoot\System32\drivers\VIDEOPRT.SYS
18/02/2015 13:16:40.843, Driver, 4, \SystemRoot\System32\drivers\vga.sys
18/02/2015 13:16:40.843, Driver, 4, \SystemRoot\System32\DRIVERS\RDPCDD.sys
18/02/2015 13:16:40.859, Driver, 4, \SystemRoot\system32\drivers\rdpencdd.sys
18/02/2015 13:16:40.859, Driver, 4, \SystemRoot\system32\drivers\rdprefmp.sys
18/02/2015 13:16:40.859, Driver, 4, \SystemRoot\System32\Drivers\Msfs.SYS
18/02/2015 13:16:40.875, Driver, 4, \SystemRoot\System32\Drivers\Npfs.SYS
18/02/2015 13:16:40.875, Driver, 4, \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\TDI.SYS

The code is available under the EUPL terms and hosted on GitHub at this location: https://github.com/nunobrito/BootLogger

On the download folder you find the compiled drivers (x86 and x64 versions) along with the instructions on how to use the driver on your machine.

Feedback from other users can be read at reboot on this topic:
http://reboot.pro/topic/20345-driver-for-logging-windows-boot-drivers-and-services/

Each boot log report will be placed under c:\BootLogger, this parameter is configurable in case you want to change it.

Have fun!
:-)