Vista slow boot, act to blame?

[LSEdwards]

Have a look through this:

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=2238

There are quite a few things that you can do to speed things up. If you have a multi core processor you need to set Vista to use all cores at startup for example (tip 34).

 

[Vince]

Excuse me?

Digging a whole? Right.....

You quoted the wrong person for this and to be fair I didn't quote you or mention your name

Even Microsoft where quick to cover up Vista hence why they brought out Windows 7 so soon after Vista. There are some many things Microsoft have done to try to distance Win7 away from Vista. Take the name for instance. They called it a number rather than a name, jsut make make it epically clear to consumer , this is not Vista.

Vista was badly recieved by consumers and businesses alike for many reasons, firstly there was a huge gap in microsofts development lifecycle after xp. As a consequence when vista came along and people put it on older hardware its larger footprint showed. This does not make a bad os.

I too have vista and I too ran SP1. Yea it is a fully useable o.s no doubt.

But compared to another modern fully useable o.s is is poor. Slow, ponderous, navigation menues are sloppy etc... it is down there with windows ME in terms of poor o.s, where as it is indeed commonly accepted that Windows 7 is up there with the absolute magic that was and still is Win Xp.

Digging a whole... bah, I offering advice!

I beg to differ xp is in no way magic, it was a vast improvement and a step in the right direction from win me but was still just a ui update and a few features from win 2k. You have to remember that the dev lifecycle on os's from microsoft work in the same kind of tick tock manner that intel use for their cpu's.

vista was a tick away from xp in terms of security, features and design, that same design that makes up the roots of 7, which is a tock from vista offering a few enhancements to the ui and small increases in performance. The same pattern you see from 2k to xp.

 

[mattyfez]

Ok, phase 1 complete,

I timed with a stopwatch on my phone from a cold boot:

Bear in mind I've already msconfiged it and run avg, ccleaner, malwarebytes and spybot, all clean.

Test 1.
Boot time from off, untill firefox has opened my google homepage:
2 mins 8 secs

Test 2.
As above, removed guest account, disable UAC, remove AVG, found nero updater in services- disabled that also.
1 min 34 secs

 

[BinnsY]

ubt.

But compared to another modern fully useable o.s is is poor. Slow, ponderous, navigation menues are sloppy etc... it is down there with windows ME in terms of poor o.s, where as it is indeed commonly accepted that Windows 7 is up there with the absolute magic that was and still is Win Xp.

Umm.....

You do realise in terms of version numbers Vista is version 6 and Windows 7 is version 6.1? There really isnt anything like the kind of difference you make out, windows Vista and 7 even share lots of the same menus. I also speak from expereince of having a Vista install on an old 500GB hard drive that was a good 2.5 years old, about 6 months ago I moved to Windows 7 on a brand new 1TB drive, yes it is quicker, but not anything like the extent you make out.

On my laptop which I simply re-imaged from Vista to 7, I honestly struggle to notice the speed difference. Yes there is some, but if you class 1 or 2 seconds on a 60 second boot time as a massive difference then you must really be strapped for time!

@ the OP

I found AVG to be a bit of a hog, switching to Avast seemed to result in a much quicker boot time for me. Another big killer seemed to be Steam if you have that load on start up.

 

[Matteysan]

Excuse me?

Digging a whole? Right.....

Even Microsoft where quick to cover up Vista hence why they brought out Windows 7 so soon after Vista. There are some many things Microsoft have done to try to distance Win7 away from Vista. Take the name for instance. They called it a number rather than a name, jsut make make it epically clear to consumer , this is not Vista.

You do realise that Vista was late coming out due to Microsoft having to work on XP longer? The development of SP2 for XP was one of the reasons why Vista was a long time coming. Also if you remember XP's launch it wasn't so smooth at all! SP1 & SP2 made XP what it is today. It isn't exactly a magic OS either. Yes Vista had problems at the start but that was mainly down to companies not having drivers ready even though they knew it was coming & people installing it on real old hardware. (laptops sold in the purple land comes to mind)

Windows 7 is built on Windows Vista with a few tweaks here & there & a UI update.

You are now seeing Microsofts usual release pattern. Hence why we will have Windows 8 around 2012ish.

95 (1995) > 98 (1998) > 2000 (2000) > ME (2000) > XP (2001) > Vista (2007) > 7 (2009) > 8 (2012/2013)

I think someone needs to jump off the bandwagon to be honest. Also look at VinceB1's post & sorry to Mattyfez for trashing your post with this same old tired debate.

 

[Vince]

Ok, phase 1 complete,

I timed with a stopwatch on my phone from a cold boot:

Bear in mind I've already msconfiged it and run avg, ccleaner, malwarebytes and spybot, all clean.

Test 1.
Boot time from off, untill firefox has opened my google homepage:
2 mins 8 secs

Test 2.
As above, removed guest account, disable UAC, remove AVG, found nero updater in services- disabled that also.
1 min 34 secs

Hey mate,

Good news on the boot times. Are you dissabling uac fully or putting it in quiet mode?

taken from tweak-uac.com:

"The main goal of User Account Control is to reduce the exposure and attack surface of the operating system by requiring that all users run in standard user mode. This limitation minimizes the ability for users to make changes that could destabilize their computers or inadvertently expose the network to viruses through undetected malware that has infected their computer."

I would recommend you visit that link, there is a free app there that will put uac in quite mode to stop admin prompts etc while still keeping you pretected. Not sure its affect on boot times mind you.

 

[Rroff]

Not sure if it applies to Vista but theres a rather bizarre bug in Windows 7 where if you use a plain colored background it takes an insanely long time to boot.

 

[bledd]

Don't disable UAC, use tweak-uac to 'silence' it

AVG and crap like Nero are the problem here.


Use this program to remove startup junk and google desktop, explorer plugings and crap like that.

http://pcdecrapifier.com/

The first screen it brings up the 'junk' the second screen is your add/remove programs list, so go easy on the second screen

 

[mattyfez]

Thanks for the advice so far, we are getting there I think...

Ok, phase 1 complete,

I timed with a stopwatch on my phone from a cold boot:

Bear in mind I've already msconfiged it and run avg, ccleaner, malwarebytes and spybot, all clean.

Test 1.
Boot time from off, untill firefox has opened my google homepage:
2 mins 8 secs

Test 2.
As above, removed guest account, disable UAC, remove AVG, found nero updater in services- disabled that also.
1 min 34 secs

Picked up a few tweek from LSEdwards link...

Test 3.
As above,
Enabled enhanced SATA performance
Disabled application experience, linktracking client, offline files, and TCP/IP netbios helper.
Set 4 core boot rather than the default 1 core.
And installed Avast which I guessed would add to the boot time..
1 min 32 secs

Well first reboot after intalling new AV and all the tinkering took a bit longer but to be expected, so I rebooted and retested after the OS had chance to 'settle down' as it were.

HDD health check passed ok, although the drive does 'chirp' a little during the early stages of booting.

I will look into exactly what to do with UAC today at some point, Ive just turned it off in WCP, so im not 100% sure if is off, or on silent or whatever...

Farily happy with results so far!

EDIT: just to answer other points raised... I run as light weight as I can, so no plugins or Steam, or google desktop or anything like that, apart from standard microsoft services, the only startup things are litteraly AV, Nvidia drivers and Logitek mouse software.

 

[edscdk]

reinstall?

 

[Craig321]

Hi all, my cold boot time has degraded from about 40 seconds to well over a minute.

It's clean according to avg, ccleaner, malwarebytes and spybot.

It's about as light weight as I can get it, only startup apps are logitech mouse, graphics and antivirus, system drive is about 75% full but defraged. There's nothing untoward running that I can see, although my desktop is a bit if a mess with lots of large media files.

The only thing I can think of is avg, I've used it for years but I have read its a bit of a start up hog these days, and avira might be a better option.

Any ideas? Thanks.

My Vista boot times were always crap, I just used to switch it on in the morning, go have breakfast and it was done and superfetching was finished by that time, so I'm not sure exactly how long it took. That was running Eset, Logitech mouse drivers, G15 keyboard applications & Comodo Firewall. Absolutely nothing wrong with it after startup was finished.

You just need to not watch it booting up, it's like watching a kettle boiling

 

[VeNT]

Excuse me?

Digging a whole? Right.....

Even Microsoft where quick to cover up Vista hence why they brought out Windows 7 so soon after Vista.

pure marketing.
why do the uphill and try and convince the masses that vista is fixed when you can show them the fixed vista with a new ui and sell it as something different!

 

[Craig321]

pure marketing.
why do the uphill and try and convince the masses that vista is fixed when you can show them the fixed vista with a new ui and sell it as something different!

It is mainly marketing, but you can't really deny Windows 7 is quicker/better. Yes, the fixes could have simply been Vista SP3 and SP2 was almost there, but that's not going to earn them much money now is it