In one embodiment, the present invention includes a method for generating a list of files accessed during an operating system (OS) boot process to profile the OS boot process, and optimizing the list of files to generate an optimized file list for use in future OS boot processes, where the optimizing is according to a first optimization technique if the files were accessed from a solid state medium and according to a second optimization technique if the files were accessed from a rotating medium. Other embodiments are described and claimed.