Boot Issues

Antar Bolaeisk · 30 Sep 2009 at 17:57

I'm sitting here with a laptop taking up to five minutes to boot.

Having run bootvis I can see that there are four drivers taking up to a minute each to load up.

I'm sorta stuck so would appreciate any suggestions in shaving off a few minutes from this boot time.

Here's two snapshots of the bootvis diagnostic:

Thanks in advance,
Antar.

Antar Bolaeisk · 30 Sep 2009 at 18:23

Anti virus, which I'm just after removing anyways as it was only a trial, was Norton and has already been uninstalled.

Firewall is the bog standard windows version.

I've just tried optimizing the boot process using bootvis and I'm rebooting now to see what the result is but it doesn't seem to have had much of an effect.

Antar Bolaeisk · 30 Sep 2009 at 19:01

Just poking around some more in bootvis and I noticed that my prefetch initialisation time was running over 100 seconds so I've deleted the prefetch files and I'll let it rebuild to see if that has any effect.

Another thing I've noticed is that the primary IDE channel is running in PIO mode. Should this not be DMA mode like the secondary IDE channel? If I were to assume that the hard drive is on the primary channel then would this not have an impact on the read/write times of the drive? Not really sure what the difference is between the two and if it really matters which one is being used.

Antar Bolaeisk · 30 Sep 2009 at 19:11

Thanks Sparky_H for your help. Would you believe I took the brute force approach and just uninstalled the primary IDE channel and it has reverted to DMA but I shall do a bit of background reading to find out what it all means.

Either that or clearing out the prefetch, or a combination of the two, seems to have solved my problems though as boot time is down to 30 seconds.

Thanks again.

Antar Bolaeisk · 1 Oct 2009 at 10:53

Sparky__H said:
Np Mate moment you said PIO mode I remembered. The long winded way is to change mode in device manager then change it back after restart and bios change.

Or just delete the IDE drivers...

Oh do some checks on your disks mate might have one failing on you.

Ran scan disk last night but it came back error free. I was expecting something to come up as the disk transfer mode enters PIO if there are access errors, I've seen it happen before with dodgy cds now that I think of it.

Perhaps it was just set up that way which seems odd but then it came from purple shirt world having been reset by them (it's not my laptop but belongs to a friend, honest).

Ratbag said:
Certainly on XP, boot time slows over time [often many months] and this is due to the prefetch technology which is supposed to alleviate this amongst other things.

The other thing is that it's only been running for about 4 months from when they reset it, or so I was told, so that's a very short time for windows rot to set it but then it could have been something inherent in the reset process that they performed. I have seen XP boot slowly but never to this extent, I actually was able to get a nice cup of tea while waiting for it to boot.