Discovery and Inventory Group

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Script and NS6 Custom Inventory to Track PC Startup Times 

Jan 19, 2010 05:00 PM

One of the questions we are asked to report on sometimes is the boot up time of our workstations.  To gather this data, we came up with the attached script and custom inventory .XML template.  The script executes and looks at the Windows Event Log to find the most recent "startup" event (aka the "6009" event which shows in the System Event log as Microsoft (R) Windows (R) 5.01. 2600 Service Pack 3 Multiprocessor Free.  Next, it parses the Security event log looking for "528" events which indicate user logon, then further checks for the string "Logon Type: 2" to signify a console/interactive logon.  Finally, it looks for an entry from MS Office Communicator (our corporate IM client) to determine when the desktop is available (not the best method perhaps, but it is the best we could come up with to signify when the desktop is available for use).  If you don't use MOC, you'll probably need to either skip this portion, or find some other proxy value to determine that the desktop is available.

Using these methods you can determine the time from power on to logon, and from logon to productivity (assuming of course that the user doesn't wander off to get a cup of coffee while their workstation is booting).

To customize this script, you will want to modify the COMPANY_NAME constant value in the .vbs file, and replace the string "My Company" in the .XML file so that the values can be read from the registry properly.  This could probably be easily converted to be used in NS7 custom inventory, but I unfortunately don't have the time to do so at the moment.

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Uploaded - Feb 25, 2020

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Jan 26, 2010 02:44 PM

it actually leverages the SysInternals/Microsoft 'Autoruns' tool which pulls auto-launching items from about 7 different places in the registry and the Startup folder! :)

Jan 26, 2010 01:59 PM

I've been missing a lot on connect recently to my shame. :-(

Have put these on my todo list for a twirl. I feel very nervous just imagining what the startup folder scavenging will reveal.....


Jan 25, 2010 04:47 PM

...did you see my Autorun collection custom inventory?  Also handy for tracking/reporting on the lovely junk users have running at startup.

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/downloads/custom-inventory-collect-autorun-items

Jan 25, 2010 04:45 PM

Yeah our metrics guy really loves this...the only bad part is when you make a change that testing and logic shows should improve boot time (i.e. disabling Acrobat speed launcher) and it actually marginally INCREASES boot time! 

Jan 25, 2010 02:44 PM

Absolute gold dust!

Its worth to get a dummy startup app onto all our desktops just to get a unified app  to hook this into. Excellent.

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