Vista 64 - Occasional Extremely Slow Startup

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Alex.

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Gentlemen. I have a problem. Every now and then my computer will start up EXTREMELY slowly. It is normal speed until the login screen but when I put my password in it can take anything up to 1 hour to load the programs from then on.

It makes everything go slow, almost like reduced RAM or something but I dont really use that much anyway. My specs are:

HP A6544
Windows Vista Home Premium 64
4.00GB RAM
AMD Phenom 8450 triple core
NVidia GeForce 9500 GS
670GB Hard Drive, of which 408GB is free


I have googled, some say it could be the anti virus, there are many possibilities. I use Norton and run regular virus scans.

Bear in mind my PC is usually very fast, but 1 in 10 or 15 startups after login it is stupidly slow :ouch:
 
I find it difficult to believe nobody here can help me.
 
Is there a chance that Norton or any of your other security software is holding up the startup processes in order to do a full scan before programs are loaded into memory and such?
 
It's possible, but my dad uses it for his vista lap top and does not have this problem. I will have to look into the settings etc.
 
I don't think it's Norton - we've got it on my mum's Vista laptop and it doesn't cause any trouble. It seems to run background scans stupidly frequently, but other than that there's no problems.

I don't think it's the RAM either - even if 90% of it suddenly died and Vista was forced to run mostly on the pagefile, I'm sure it would take less than an hour to get going. And besides, the login screen would have been considerably slowed down too.

My guess is that it's some obscure bit of software that every now and again throws a tizzy and starts using 100% of your CPU. But even in a case like that, your user account shouldn't take that long to appear. If you can, give it the ole' CTRL Alt Delete treatment and see if anything's being a processor hog.
 
I watched task manager like a hawk on the last startup, on all the tabs. The percentages are never over 50 or so, but Windows Live Messenger and a couple of other large programs are set to start with windows so I have since changed their settings.


What I have noticed is this 'slow mode' malarky, I can sometimes feel the PC getting slower and slower, some programs might stop responding for a few seconds or I'll get a delayed window change, but this is after I've been using it for hours when it's quick.... Then it will take up to 20 mins to shut down, and still be slow when I start up. It seems to be some sort of time-band of slowness the PC goes through whether starting up or shutting down or even just during normal operation. It's usually very quick, but it was quite slow today and this is the 3rd or 4th time in a row it has been like this. I'll see how it goes today, speedwise...
 
I'd type msconfig at the bottom of your start menu, run it and go to the "Startup" tab. There will be listed all the software that starts up when you first start windows. I'd unselect Norton and see what happens for a while - it won't uninstall it it just won't start up when you load the computer. You can always tick it again if the problem still appears, or you can manually load the program once the computer has finished loading.

You can do this to anything on the list and see if the problem still appears. It's just a bit of experimentation really. You might find something that needs uninstalling too. I try to keep software to a minimal when my computer starts up because it's sooo much quicker - my anti-virus and my Firewall being the only major ones. Takes just over half a minute to load everything from the log-in screen (which I've now removed :p ).

Just don't go unticking unecessary ones, like audio and video managers etc, because you'll need them. ;)
 
The intermittency of the symptoms is a problem. I suspect that the system is waiting for something to initialise. Perhaps a piece of hardware is present or missing when the bootup takes longer? It certainly sounds hardware-ish to me. For example, my WD MyBook takes a while to spin up the discs, which the system waits for. If I unplug the MyBook, my system starts 10s faster. Similarly with the DVD drive: if there's a disc in it, the system reads the disc. If there isn't, the drive sends "no disc" and the boot moves on.

Time the boots with your watch, noting the time when things happen on the system, then review the event log for events around those times.

And delete all these pesky "Let <vendor> check for software updates automatically" messages, apart from Microsoft. The last thing you want is for 27 software updaters to be looking for updates at startup. Say what you like about them, but Windows Update is the most graceful of all the auto-updaters.

In summary, I suspect a hardware issue.
 
Thanks for the diagnosis Giles, I have also noticed a loose correlation with temperature but I doubt thats it.

e.g. Very hot all last week was slow all week, cooler this week was very fast, hotter today and was very slow.....

I'm on a lap top at the minute but it has taken 30 mins to sit on desktop and do nothing. When I restart it I'll look at the processes and log too.

EDIT: Just got this message : 'logon process has failed to create the security options dialogue':sick:

google seems to think its a symantec patch.....Andrew may be right.....
 
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