Last week I was in Seattle and Portland to visit friends, family, and business associates. The weekend turned out to be a marathon of meetings and traveling which produced a lot of results. Part of the trip was talking to potential employers in the area where I could work remotely from Texas.
My good friend Jason Herre has recently come under the employment of Microsoft working on a new team at Microsoft called 'Velocity.' He's been there for just a few months, and extols the virtues of the group and what they do regularly. Like many groups in Microsoft, they are expanding and therefore hiring. Jason felt I may be a fit for one of their heads, so I spent some time with their group on Friday finding out what they do.
Essentially they encourage and inspire OEM partners to make their machines faster and reduce the impact of their native software. When you first buy a new computer, that is as fast as it will ever be. Past day one, your machine gets slower and slower until you reformat and reinstall it. It's a terrible solution to hear from your tech savvy relative or support person, "Oh, you should just reinstall." The Velocity team tackles this with a very cool tool called Xperf. It's a diagnostic tool that hooks up to Microsoft's remote symbol server and analyzes everything that is using up system resources on your computer over a given period of time.
This might sound mundane, but there are key periods of computer use which infuriate consumers and myself alike. They are,
Startup; "I'm going to go get a cup of coffee or waste some time for a few minutes because I know that even though I can see the desktop, it's not going to respond to my inputs until the disk IO light goes off who knows how many minutes later."
Shutdown: "I swear I'm headed out the door as soon as this computer turns off. Get your keys. Where's my wallet? Do I have my phone? Do you have the directions to where we're going? Why hasn't this thing turned off yet?"
Sleep/Hibernate: "Why do you carry your laptop around open? Oh, it never really shuts off when I close the lid. It just heats up my bag and wastes battery. If I closed it, by the time I got to the meeting room, it would take longer to come out of sleep than if I just hard cycled the power."
Anyone who has used a laptop in a business environment has likely run into one or all of the above. Xperf shows the exact process, the exact driver responsible for taking up CPU, Disk IO, network, and a myriad of other resources. The tools is not discriminatory either. It points the finger at OEM software as well as Microsoft processes. It's the UV light at the crime scene that is your start up experience.
Looking at just one example OEM machine, I could easily tell symptoms like waiting for a network response, or waiting to detect a piece of hardware that isn't connected, or a piece of start up software that uses a lot of disk. In many cases there are layers of offenses that if addressed can shave 15-30 seconds from each of the above scenarios. The best part is you can download the tools for free to find out where your machine is slow.