Hanging on Start Up

Hi,

I am using Vista Home Premium on HP dv4 Notebook.

For the last one month, it has started hanging at Start Up. All I am able to do is to move the mouse pointer.

The desktop becomes unresponsive, neither the icons get clicked nor start menu responds.

Ctrl+Alt+Del also does not work. The only way to re-start is to take off the battery.

I have also experienced my OS getting slow. Pls assist for resolution.

 

hmm try starting your pc in safe mode (f8 while booting) and see if it start fine

If yes then you need disable the startup programs one by one to find out the culprit

if no then you need scan your pc for virus

 

Run Msconfig and disable start up programs

 

Thanks for your replies vinumsv & The_Moo™. Will try per your advice.

BTW, I forgot to mention;

* I keep running CCleaner regularly & have scanned it with Avast too.
* It does hangup in the middle of usage more often than the Start-Up Hang Up.
It hangs for a span of two minutes & then all the actions performed while hang-up follow. (Like clicking of icons, start menu etc.)
The Start-Up Hang Up is occurring once in 2days.

It started in Safe Mode.

 

Then one of your auto startup program is the culprit try disabling them one by one to see which is causing the issue.

 

Go to control panel > Administrative Tools > Event Viewer > Applications & Services Logs > Microsoft > Windows > Diagnostics Performance > Operational

There you will see a list of events that have been logged. Are there any that are critical (red circle, white cross in the centre)?

This is probably the beter way for what may be sporadic issues - just unchecking startup programs might not help because it could be something other than your starndard startup programs, and even if it's one of those, if it doesn't happen all the time then checking/unchecking startup programs could take far too long.

 

Thanks for your reply.

Yes there are events with Level as Critical under Task Category - Boot Performance Monitoring.

 

OK, so now ignore the ones that say something like:

Windows has started up:
Boot Duration : 132300ms
IsDegradation : false
Incident Time (UTC) : 02/07/2009 11:40:26

Instead, around the same time that those events happened, there will be events marked as Warnings or Errors (yellow triangles or red circles with exclamation marks). Look at those, they will most likely be applications that are falling over or taking too long to load. That should help you pinpoint where the problem is.

For example, here is one from mine:

This application took longer than usual to start up, resulting in a performance degradation in the system startup process:
File Name : avguard.exe
Friendly Name : Antivirus On-Access Service
Version : 9.00.01.30
Total Time : 13418ms
Degradation Time : 6174ms
Incident Time (UTC) : 19/06/2009 17:44:52

What you are looking for is anything with a total time or degradation time that is considerably longer than those above.

Also, in that same screen, when you have an error highlighted, on the right hand side you can click on the help option (I think last on the list). You can then look up the error online. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't to be honest; but if it's not clear what the problem is, sometimes that can yield some answers.

 

@Fragilexx: Tried going through that log but hv'nt been able to figure out.
Here's the edited log with events marked as Warnings or Errors for last one week. Pls review.

 

OK, none of that looks problematic. Let's try another approach.

Goto control panel > adminsitrative tools > Reliability & Performance Monitor > Monitoring Tools > Reliability Monitor

Any red flags in there? (by which I mean anything that isn't an install / uninstall)

 

Yup, there are three Red Cross in Application Failures from 05-06-09;

14-06-09: Application - setup.exe | Failure - Stopped Responding.
21-06-09: Application - RunDLL32.exe | Failure - Stopped Working.
02-07-09: Application - avant.exe | Failure - Stopped Responding.

 

Are you running the 64-bit or the 32-bit version of _Vista?

 

32-bit Vista Home Premium

 

Ok. First question (actually, second, but nevermind ): have you updated all of your drivers via the _HP support website? If you don't know, you should go to the _HP support website for your specific machine, click on the downloads link, and get to the list of downloads available for your machine. They will be broken down by category, such as Audio, BIOS, etc. Go through each one, and check the version number of the latest version on the website against the version number of the driver that's currently installed on your computer. If anything is out-of-date, update it.

The reason I'm suggesting that you do this manually, instead of just using the automatic "HP Update" utility (or the even more annoying "PC Health" utility) is that I've had problems with those two little apps from time to time where they either miss an update, or list phantom updates that I either don't need, or that don't exist.

Once you've got everything up-to-date, including the BIOS, see if your problem still persists. From looking through your performance diagnostics list, it looks like there's a driver that's not loading properly at startup (it could be the audio, or the bluetooth drivers, or something else entirely) and as a consequence it's causing a cascade of delayed startups for everything that comes after it. Because drivers get into the deep plumbing of the system, if a driver is hanging when it first loads up, it may be blocking at a high priority level, which means that nothing else can get execution time on the CPU until that driver either terminates with an error, or gets its act together and finishes up whatever's causing it to hang (polling bluetooth devices is a notorious system-hanger).