What could make Ultimate this slow?

[Bob Feduniak]

I've been using Vista Ultimate for six or so uneventful months. Two
days ago, it seemed to be hanging on the "Welcome" screen, but worked
fine in safe mode. Today, I tried to start it normally again, and it
again seemed to hang on welcome. I forgot about it, then noticed 1/2
hour later that my desktop started to appear, and after about two
hours it had finished booting up.

I'd welcome any thoughts or suggestions.

Bob Feduniak

 

[Not Me]

That sounds like you have either installed a program or driver that is
causing a slow boot; or you have become infected with spyware or a virus.
What changes were made in the day before the slow boot started?

It's also possible it's a hardware issue, but if safe mode is faster, that
isn't likely.

 

[ato_zee]

I forgot about it, then noticed 1/2
hour later that my desktop started to appear, and after about two
hours it had finished booting up.

Similar problem Vista Ultimate 64bit, 4GB RAM, 3.06GHz
processor. I'm wondering if it is indexing everything before
it boots. With a large HD that might explain it.
Otherwise it might be a new phenomena "The Vista
Boot of Death" you die of old age before it boots.
Think it started after automatic updates.

 

[alexB]

This is my private (and uneducated) opinion.

It is a weird thing and cost me three of four reinstallation because
assumed (wrongly) that the system would never come back and I had to
reinstall it.

I do have ultimate on three computers now. What I've decided to do when such
things happen is to wait and never touch it until it comes back and it
always does.

It is my observation that this happens after some updates/upgrades by MS.
Some updates have to cover so much territory you would never believe. Just
an analogy: an installation of SP2 for VS2005 took so long I go absolutely
scared. You feel like the system hung up and got in a loop somewhere.

Thus it may be only first time after an upgrade of anything you perhaps are
not aware about the MS downloaded in your machine while you were asleep. We
haven't seen it in XP for two reasons: smaller OS and the fact that the XP
developer who has since retired and never passed their experience onto the
next generation were kind enough to give us warnings what the upgrade were
doing.

Your boot will get faster as time goes by. I've seen it. You can also
download a MS baseline Security Analyzer (free from MS website) and have it
run wild. It will show you what other, yes upgrades, you are missing and
should download. This may work either way, of course.

You can also try to make it vLite, I think. There is a list of services you
definitely can do without. It requires a thoughtful approach, you can turn
those off and usually it accelerates things quite a bit. this may give you a
temporary respite until they find a fix to your problem in case it is
universal.

Vista does have a tendency to repair itself but you will have to leave it
overnight at times with the Internet access on.

 

[alexB]

Don't be that categorical. It is a good thing that Vista is doing it. Let it
boot this way for the first time after an upgrade, then the boot will
accelerate.

 

[Andre Da Costa[ActiveWin]]

First thing I would check is the Event Viewer to see if there are any logged
reports that could probably give a clue as to what might be causing the
performance issues.

I would do a disk clean up, download and install the latest device drivers
for your system, run a system scan with your Antivirus and Antispyware
utility. Also, make sure your applications and are up to date.

Open the Run Command (Windows key + R), select the 'Startup' tab uncheck any
unnecessary programs that might be starting up with the system.

 

[xiowan]

Hello "ato_zee":
I recently installed Vista Ultimate 64 bit on my pc with 4 x 1 GB of
DDR2 RAM and was experiencing very slow boot times and the pc seemed slower
than I expected. I finally ran into some info online suggesting that 4 GB of
memory could be the cause. I switched 2 of the modules to 512 MB and now the
pc is running beautifully and boots almost as fast as my XP computer! You
might try that or even just cut back to 2 GB's and see if your pc doesn't
respond much better. There are supposedly some M.S. patches available that
solve the 4GB+ problem but many of the posts on the subject said the patches
didn't help so I just switched to less memory and what an improvement!

xiowan.........in tucson

 

[Bob Feduniak]

Thanks to all who responded to my original post. All suggestions
seemed to have merit. Just rebooting it several times improved the
boot time from interminable to merely intolerable, and running disk
cleanup helped some more. But the event log found the real culprit--a
bad hard drive sector had cropped up less than 24 hours before the
problem started.

Bob Feduniak