14 DAY TRIAL // A fix offered by Microsoft is designed to help customers deal with poor boot performance in specific scenarios involving Windows 7 and Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1).
The Redmond company confirmed the issue and noted that impacted users have created a large number of restore points, a move which cause the slowing down of the startup process.
According to the software giant, affected customers are most likely using large hard disks in addition to create too many restore points on their machines.
Microsoft did not explain just how slow the startup process gets, but it appears that boot performance degradation is sufficient for users to become aware that something it’s going on.
“This issue occurs because the boot plan for the ReadyBoot feature exceeds the size limit of 512 kilobytes (KB). Each restore point creates a snapshot of Windows that Volsnap.sys must validate during the startup process,” Microsoft explained.
“When you create many restore points, the boot plan for the ReadyBoot feature eventually exceeds the size limit of 512 KB, and cannot be stored. Therefore, startup I/O operations are not precached, and the startup process is slow.
“The boot plan is stored in the following registry entry: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\rdyboost\Parameters\BootPlan.”
An update is not available for download from Microsoft at this point in time, and considering the company’s way of resolving the issue, a refresh will not be provided.
Instead, customers that have experiencing boot performance problems after creating many restore points can head over to Microsoft Support, download and deploy the KB2555428 hotfix.
Users not experiencing slowed down boot times should not deploy the hotfix since it will not accelerate startup speed in any manner.
Microsoft indicates that the KB2555428 hotfix will be packed inside Windows 7 Service Pack 2 (SP2), and this is the best way for end users to get it.
Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1) RTM Build 7601.17514.101119-1850 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (SP1) RTM are available for download here.
Windows 7 RTM Enterprise 90-Day Evaluation is available for download here.