Checking Hard Disk Caching Policy in Windows 7
The write-caching policy for hard drives in Windows 7 is enabled by default. Although, this improves the overall performance of the system, if there is a power failure and the system has no backup power such as, an UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply) data waiting in cache will be lost!
Categories: Performance Tags: buffer flushing, cache, cache flushing, Diagnostics-Performance, disk, event viewer, power failure, write caching
Troubleshooting lengthy startups
Windows event logs are a very important tool for monitoring the health of systems and troubleshooting issues when they arise. Since Windows Vista, Microsoft added additional logs known as Application and Service logs, so that applications and services installed on the computer will have individual logs. This category of logs includes four subtypes for which the application or service can provide events, which are Admin, Operational, Analytic, and Debug logs. Details about the category of logs will be explained in a separate article, however, a brief explanation of the Operational events is needed as to help us troubleshoot startup problems!
I have created a small application called Boot Time that helps you monitor Boot times. The Boot Time utility requires administrative privileges to run successfully, hence if you are logged as a normal user without admin rights, start the application by right-clicking BootTime.exe and then click Run as administrator. For further details read below 
