75sec delay at Starting Windows screen

My system: HDX18 with 4GB, booting Windows7 (work system), Windows 7 clean (backup system), UBUNTU, and (lately) Windows 8 Developer Preview.
All are 64bit versions of W7 Ultimate.

Since about a week or so, my system waits at the black screen that says "starting up Windows". It waits for about 75 sec (each boot!!) and then the startup continues. This happens with ALL my windows systems on this machine. Each waits about 75 sec.
While it waits the disk LED stays dark. After the 75 sec. it blinks due to the continuing startup.
I have looked at the disks (check disk, etc.) and have done the SFC stuff. I also looked in the eventloogs but there is nothing logged that early in startup time. The SMART status of the disk is fine also.

This has nothing to do with the application being started up. This comes later. And I have set most to delayed startup. And in my backup Win7 system there is nothing installed and it shows the symptoms too.

Searching with Google resulted in many things but mostly related to desktop PCs, not to laptops.

Windows 8 DevPrev was the latest clean install (after the symptom showed up) and also shows the symptoms.

Any ideas what else I can do to get back to a fast startup?
I am really at a loss here!

Thanks a lot in advance

Thomas

 

Sorry forgot to say, I am using the lates BIOS and the latest drivers from this thread:

 

I've heard that this is an issue with the Intel/AMD graphics switching. Initialization of the intel card will cause a very long delay before login.

 

Thanks, BUT why does this start now, about 2 years after using the laptop without this??

Thomas

 

And my notebook has NVIDIA graphics!

 

Oh wait.

I didn't realize that you had an HDX, this is a problem plaguing envies with switchable graphics.

Sorry if I confused you.

 

Personally I would start with process of elimination.

1. Blow out the dust.
2. Do you have any USB devices plugged in? If so, try removing them.
3. Reset the BIOS to defaults. Bump HDD up the list for booting.
4. Turn off the onboard NIC in the BIOS.
5. Turn off extraneous ports (serial, parallel, etc) in the BIOS.
6. Remove the DVD/CD drive.
7. Remove the WiFi card.
8. If you have dual RAM sticks, remove one and check boot. Swap and check again.
9. If you have an extra hdd lying around, sub that one in and do a clean win7 install.

If in the end you have a stripped system and a clean OS install, then the problem has to be failed hardware on the MB.

Good luck.

 

Thanks a lot!
Your point re. USB was the hitter.

I hav an external USB drive (Western Digital USB 3 in a USB2 port) for online backup purposes.
When I removed this device the boot time was as before.

Now the question remains, what does windows do with that device for 75 seconds ? The device is 2TB in size!

Again, thanks

Thomas

 

I don't know.. I leave my USB drives plugged in all the time without this delay so its got to be a config setting somewhere. Definitely bump up the internal HDD in the boot order (or bump USB down the list) in the BIOS. Make sure your bios is also updated. Finally, if the USB has a bootable primary partition or MBR, you might need to repartition and reformat the USB drive to remove the active flag or clear the MBR.