Vista slow boot, act to blame?

mattyfez

mattyfez

mattyfez

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12 Apr 2007
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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.
 
Well Vista is probably to blame.

Its a dinosaur in terms of O.S agility and being light on its feet.

I use AVG on my computer and I dont find it to be slow.

I had vista once upon a time, and its bad.
 
opethdisciple said:
Well Vista is probably to blame.

Its a dinosaur in terms of O.S agility and being light on its feet.

I use AVG on my computer and I dont find it to be slow.

I had vista once upon a time, and its bad.
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Not very helpfull!

I've never had issue to be fair, and cannot justify upgrading.

It's a reasonably new install as I managed to wreck it with tinkering, but other than that I can't fault it.
 
On my Vista Pc I switched from Kaspersky 2010 to MSE 2.0 and it improved things a fair bit. I can now use the system much sooner once it reaches the desktop as well.
 
I notice you have mentioned an antivirus, are you running any firewall software at all?

My boot times have rocketed up after I did some Windows Updates and Comodo firewall did a complete upgrade on my Win7 install.
 
Thanks for the replies, it's fine once its up and running, quick as you like, it's just the initial boot up...

It seems to whip through POST/BIOS etc and then slows at the windows splash screen/loading bar.
... I remember it used to be impressivley quick, I suppose it could be one of the newer windows updates causing it (I hope not).

Only firewall is windows built in jobbie.

Im gonna get rid of AVG, just as a matter of elimination more than anything as I have heard from a few sources its latest itteration has been about as well recived as a dose of the clap, due to resource overheads.

One other possibility is a windows repair as in chdsk/r etc. as I have noticed, maybe one in ten boots it will freeze at the windows loading bar screen, the loading bar remains empty, and slightly ghosted and it just hangs. it then requires a reset and then it boots.
 
mattyfez said:
Not very helpfull!

I've never had issue to be fair, and cannot justify upgrading.

It's a reasonably new install as I managed to wreck it with tinkering, but other than that I can't fault it.
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Ok, i agree this isnt fair and unhelpful.

But I am telling you the honest truth. Vista is the problem, not your installed applications.

Maybe you have a slowish hdd? Have you defraged the hdd?

Honestly tho dude, you will end up baning your head against a wall, as its Vista that is the culprit... I went through what your going through, when I first got Vista.
 
Try uncluttering your pc's for one.

Less programs running similtaneosly = faster boot.

msconfig, and turn useless start up items off.

Defrag thos hdd.... and Im not talking about Win7, Vista isa resource hog, no denying that.

One of the worst O.S in history along with Windows ME.

I am also just trying to help.....

Allright in light of trying to be more helpful, have you upgraded the O.S to sp1?
 
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opethdisciple said:
Try uncluttering your pc's for one.

Less programs running similtaneosly = faster boot.

msconfig, and turn useless start up items off.

Defrag thos hdd.... and Im not talking about Win7, Vista isa resource hog, no denying that.

One of the worst O.S in history along with Windows ME.

I am also just trying to help.....

Allright in light of trying to be more helpful, have you upgraded the O.S to sp1?
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Thanks for the help, no offence but this isn't a debate about the pros and cons of vista :p
It runs absolutley fine on a well specced m
Machine.

Hard drive is a wd 640, all the other questions are answered in my first post. But thanks anyway! Pc spec is in my signature for reference.
 
opethdisciple said:
Thats true this isnt a debate about the prosand cons of Vista.

But you asked the question why is my PC so slow to boot.

I gave you the answer. Vista.
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Again not very helpful! I've have loosly timed it from cold boot to fully functional desktop, and it used to be about 33 seconds, its more like 120 now.

Edit: I have a guest account enabled which I could get rid of, other than that it's just my/administration account.. can't see. That would be the issue though?
 
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tbh I love it when people start moaning about vista, just shows me who has and who has not used vista since SP1
Vista is a fine OS. no-where near the lame duck that it's branded with

re the op's question
if you're talking about post login (ie if it asks for password etc) then I found that steam for some reason made my logins REALLY slow, I stopped it starting at boot and my times halved
may be worth checking what you've running at startup and once AVG is gone make sure it's not left any more crud around.
Also things like defrag progs can try to run at boot so may be worth checking if they are too
MSCONFIG is a good place to start
 
Well said VeNT, Opeth kept on digging that hole for him/herself.

Well, I've just found out what is causing my boot delay, one of my drives has failed and I didn't even spot it, wasn't until i decided to watch an episode of Carl Sagan's Cosmos that I realised I was missing a drive in My Computer.

Have you considered checking your drives for errors matty?
 
I love it when people slate vista so hard and praise win 7 like its some all singing all dancing dream os... when the reality is that whats under the hood is practically the same with in my opinion minor improvements to the front end.

As vent said go through ms config and start stripping back unwanted start up programmes and services, clear out any temp fles in both windows directory and user temp files. Finally run a disk clean up and a defrag if needed. If nothing has changed and performance is still dire then it might be worth checking the health of the disk using hd tune or similar.

This normally works for me, my old install before I upgraded my machine yesterday was installed in feb 08 so the vista install was 3 years old when I upgraded and in that time I had little to no problems. In fact I prefer vista over 7 so the new build is going vista again :)
 
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Thanks, Yeh i've done msconfig and all the usual suspects, avg, ccleaner, malwarebytes and spybot.

Not got round to anything else yet, ill time it tonight, and then remove avg and guest account and compare.

Good tip thanks I will look at hdd diagnostics... is it fairly quick to use or do you need to run it for weeks for monitoring? Last time I ran hdd. Checking software and few years ago and it required extensive monitoring time to be accurate..
 
Thanks, Yeh i've done msconfig and all the usual suspects, avg, ccleaner, malwarebytes and spybot.

Not got round to anything else yet, ill time it tonight, and then remove avg and guest account and compare.

Good tip thanks I will look at hdd diagnostics... is it fairly quick to use or do you need to run it for weeks for monitoring? Last time I ran hdd. Checking software and few years ago and it required extensive monitoring time to be accurate..
 
VinceB1 said:
I love it when people slate vista so hard and praise win 7 like its some all singing all dancing dream os... when the reality is that whats under the hood is practically the same with in my opinion minor improvements to the front end.

As vent said go through ms config and start stripping back unwanted start up programmes and services, clear out any temp fles in both windows directory and user temp files. Finally run a disk clean up and a defrag if needed. If nothing has changed and performance is still dire then it might be worth checking the health of the disk using hd tune or similar.

This normally works for me, my old install before I upgraded my machine yesterday was installed in feb 08 so the vista install was 3 years old when I upgraded and in that time I had little to no problems. In fact I prefer vista over 7 so the new build is going vista again :)
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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.

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! :o
 
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