Posted on 04/13/2009 8:20:14 PM PDT by Blogger
Several months ago, my computer crashed on me. Wouldn't even get to the beginning stages of boot up. Lights flickered if you hit the button, but beyond that, nothing. So, I took it to Best Buy where I bought it and where it was still under warrantee. They determined it was a fried motherboard. Consistent with the warrantee, the Geek Squad replaced it. Ever since that time, it takes about 2-3 minutes to boot up. Everything else seems to run fine, but boot up is excruciatingly slow. Any ideas why what normally took 30 seconds or so now takes 5 times a long?
Vista?
Try booting up in safe mode. Also check to see if it needs to be defragged and run a chkdsk to check for errors on your hard drive.
If it’s just slow at the power-on sequence (not necessarily the “boot” itself), you should probably check to see whether your antivirus software (and update software for everything else) isn’t set to “run at startup.”
How many active startup items do you have?
2. Download CCleaner and run that afterward to help assure traces are gone.
3. Go to the Start button and type in msconfig.exe and if in Vista, run as Administrator. Go to your Startup tab and look at all items your are starting up. You don't need the Adobe Preloader, Adobe Updater, Java Updater, QuickTime Updater, etc. Uncheck all of those. Check all the rest of your loading items on in Google by typing in the program name (comes right before “.exe”). If you need to feel comfortable with getting updates to all of the above programs, download Secunia PSI and have that run in their place. It is much smaller and checks a ton more programs.
4. Make sure your antivirus and antispyware aren't bogging your system down. The tightest antivirus is probably ESET’s NOD32. Others to consider are the free Avira, but AVG and Avast both take quite a bit of resources. For free, get Avira.
Run the Disk Defragmenter after all the above. You will have probably gotten yourself back to the best speed you had before.
Does the screen freeze for more than 30 seconds during boot? If so, tell what you are seeing.
It could be many things. For instance, they could have left the bios setting on which scans all of memory. (This is probably a good thing to leave.) If they left the memory scan on, then the BIOS usually tells you that it is scanning memory.
They could have also altered the order of device searching during the boot where your hard disk might be low on the list.
There could also be a lot of things added to your startup. A lot of new computers, or newly loaded computers, get a bunch of garbage loaded at startup in order to send you pop-ups describing the stuff they want you to buy. Do you notice more items in the task tray on the far right lower corner?
Vista. But no problems with Vista until now.
I have ESET. Heard about it on Free Republic :)
Love it.
Turn off ALL of your firewall, phishing, virus software. And then get all of the crap on your desktop...if that doesn’t work then get a new computer!
re-format
get an extra hard drive and have one that contains ONLY work and the other boot drive for fun and games
get a good pc cleanup program regclean is a good one
Despite what BreezyDog suggests, do NOT turn off your firewall and virus protection software! If you want to go this route, then first reach around behind and UNPLUG from the internet, then turn off those protections and reboot. Do not replug until you have your firewall and virus protection back in place.
I’d start with “start/run/msconfig” check your list of startup programs. I’d start by disabling all of them. Sometimes I’d leave things like any sort of sound card software running. But I’d disable as much as possible. If it boots faster, use process of elimination from there.
Reboot your computer and log into the BIOS Setup (F2 on a Dell). Check to see if you computer is configured to do a fast (quick) boot or if configured to run a complete system diagnostic upon boot-up. This can add several minutes to the boot process, depending on your computer.
The Geek squad around here will configure any computer to run the dignostics upon startup (helps to identify hardware issues before the OS is loaded); they usually don’t reset the computer to run a quick boot, you have to do that yourself.
Bingo!
bookmark
I do this for a living and I have seen in recent months hundreds of examples of what you describe. In fact tomorrow I am re-imaging the hard drives of an entire branch of the company I work for..,
The cause is currently unknown - but a complete ‘from scratch’ - wiping out the volume partitions on the hard drive — then reinstalling Windows XP or Vista from the CD — then reinstalling all your applications - will return you computer to normal... Drastic - yes - but nothing less will do the job... BUT - first you must back up all your data - My Documents, document folders, etc. — then restore them after the re-installation.
Sorry - but that is the way it is...
After tomorrow - I have Six more Corporate Branches to go...
It slowly gets to a blank blue screen (not the infamous blue screen of death but the one that matches the Vista opening screen with my user icon).
I just tried deleting programs, and I went to msconfig.exe and turned off some unnecessary programs didn’t work. I’m going to look for whether it is doing a quick bootup in the BIOS or not.
Actually, there weren’t a lot. A few unnecessary ones, but mostly system type stuff.
I had the Geek squad come to my home, seems some tree trunks were interfering with my cables, putting strain on them and not allowing a “full” connection, cables were replaced with lots of slack..internet, phone and television reception are now first rate.
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