Sony Vaio S: Very slow startup

I have a Sony Vaio S model VPCSB190X (i5 2410M 2.3GHz 4GB) with Win7 Home Premium 64-bit Service Pack 1, which has decided to change from a typical startup time of 2min to an annoying time of 5+ min. I didn't install any new application, and it has been like that for many days.

Any idea on what is the cause and how to solve this issue?

 

Did you check your hard drive for errors?

 

It sounds like a bad hard drive, also check whats in your start up?

My VAIO SA with SSD only takes 16 seconds from press of button to full bootup.

 

I performed a hard-drive check and none error was detected.

During the startup, the welcome screen goes quickly, but the system seems to struggle to establish a network connection.

Monitoring the activities during the boot, I noticed that the CPU and memory usage are not that high (the CPU usage ranges from 5 to 40% and the memory usage is less than 1GB).

I did a clean boot, following the instructions provided in:
How to troubleshoot a problem by performing a clean boot in Windows Vista or in Windows 7
but even with that, it still took ~5min to finish the startup process.

Aside the startup, the laptop runs really fast.

 

Have you tried booting up in safe mode?

Does loading other programs after booting take long?

Also try disabling your network connections during bootup to see if that changes anything.

 

1. Check the BIOS for network booting options and make sure they are disabled.

2. Check the hard disk controller in device manager. Sometimes it gets disturbed and starts running in PIO mode. Uninstall the controller, reboot and let it install the driver again, and reboot. (However, this problem affects apparent speed even after booting (e.g. loading of apps), so you are probably fine).

If the HDD activity LED is lit for a long time, establishing a network connection will take more time as that task gets queued among all the other tasks.

 

After analyzing the overall system performance more carefully, I noticed that indeed all tasks were running slow. As there were other little Windows' related problems, I decided for a more extreme action an performed an out-of-the-box installation.

After installing everything back, the start-up has been fast as it should.

The conclusion is that I don't know what was causing the problem, but the hard-drive is not faulty.

Now that everything is running smoothly, I'm planning to create an image using Acronis to avoid spending quite a while to bring everything to this state.

I appreciate the support provided.

 

I have been using ccleaner for about nearly 11 months with my vaio notebooks and it keeps the startup within 60 seconds! The freeware is great...