Vista startup slow on high end pc

[Jason]

Ok so here is the situation I am dealing with right now. I recently built a
new pc and got myself a copy of Vista Home Premuim installed on it. After
installing Vista everything for the most part seemed fine without any
problems or conflicts. After that got all Windows Updates and also latest
drivers for my hardware. Now for the problem, even with the specs of my
system (listed below) my system take 3-4 minutes to boot. Compared to when
I dual boot it to XP and it is sitting at the desktop for me in under 1
minute. I understand that Vista is a more demanding OS than XP but
considering I went out and got the latest hardware I am overall dissapointed
with the speed offered by Vista for startup and Gaming.

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700 @ 2.66GHz
Intel DG33TL Media Series MB
4GB 2x2GB OCZ Platimun XTC DDR2-800 4-4-4-12
MSI 8800GTS-320MB OC-HD
400GB Seagate 7200.9
500GB Seagate 7200.9

I have ran msconfig and removed all additional programs, this improved the
startup only in the most slightest way. Worst thing about this is my HP
dv2000 notebook with a 1.7 Athlon X2 is somehow able to boot faster then my
desktop? Overall happy with Vista but seems that it is suffering from
problems loading anything quickly not just the startup.

 

[Mick Murphy]

Norton, Trend Micro and McAfee will slow you down.

 

[gerryf]

I sympathize--I've been down that road with several machines. Some machines
just don’t want to start quickly.

Let's see if we can at least narrow it down.

START > right click COMPUTER, choose MANAGEMENT, go to EVENT VIEWER, go to
APPLICATIONS AND SERVICE LOGS > go to MICROSOFT, go to DIAGNOSTICS -
PERFORMANCE, go to OPERATIONAL

Just to make this a little clearer and less frightening, right click
OPERATION and choose CLEAR LOG.

Now reboot.

After reboot, do this again
START > right click COMPUTER, choose MANAGEMENT, go to EVENT VIEWER, go to
APPLICATIONS AND SERVICE LOGS > go to MICROSOFT, go to DIAGNOSTICS -
PERFORMANCE, go to OPERATIONAL

You will have relatively fewer entries to wade through, but there will be
quite a few. Specifically, we are looking for EVENTIDs that begin in the
100s--these are boot events.

With each boot, you will see a 100 event that lists your entire boot time
given in milliseconds--for example, I have EventID 100 listed as boot--this
is the total boot.

Select the event and on the tab below, select DETAILS, then check the
FRIENDLY radio button (the xml is unreadable to some people)

Under friendly view, you can see BootTime..in my case, it is
114239ms...remove the last 3 digits to determine seconds--in my case 114
seconds. This is the time WINDOWS takes to boot. You may have other programs
that are tying things up and making your system unresponsive. Vista
considers this too slow and lists it as an ERROR.

Below this will be parts of the boot--again, not much information there.

Look for some more 100 series listings.

I find a WARNING with a EventID of 103--hmmm. Taking a look at that, I see
that Audio.srv. Looking at the details, it says total time is 390 with a
degradation time of 143--so, my audio service took roughly one-third times
longer than Windows thinks it should have to start.

I know I just loaded a new Beta Driver for my audio chip so I know something
about this driver is not loading cleanly.

I was looking at another machine recently and saw similar entries for other
things. In once case, and Antivirus was taking a very long time to start. In
another, a keyboard driver was running in compatibility mode and it was
taking a long time to start. Removing the AV and they keyboard driver
resulted in dramatic increases in speed. Actually, reinstalling the exact
same AV resulted in acceptable speed degradation so I assume it was a bad
install of some sort.

On a third machine, EXPLORER.EXE was causing the issue. That machine I still
have not solved....why the heck would EXPLORER be taking so long to load.

Anyway, this method may not solve your problem, but it might point you in
the right direction.



In the middle window, you will see

 

[Jason]

Thanks Gerry for your answer it gave me a chance to look deeper into what was
causing my slow startup. I did appreciate the advice about antivirus given as
well but I am in fact a computer tech at a chain store so I know the basic
reasons. My Boot Time came out to be 116 seconds which is in fact not all
that bad. I only had a total of 7 event ID's listed after rebooting and from
them saw my issue. Seems my Logitech G-15 keyboard software is the cause it
had 3 errors for the USB hub ports it provides. In total seems its adding
nearly a full minute to my boot time so I am going to see if there is perhaps
an update and then maybe compare boot times with the G15 software on and off.

 

[gerryf]

great--glad to see that helped some....

It should also be noted that some of these errors tend to smooth out over
time after several defrag cycles (by default, once a week on Wednesdays)

I ran into yet another machine with a bad audo driver today---I took off the
"updated" one and rolled back to the original windows vista driver and boot
time dropped from 3 minutes to 1 minute and 20 seconds.