Windows Help, kinda technical question

Okay, so my machine is a Travelmate 8200, now I like my machine, but have noticed what I consider an "issue" sometimes when booting it takes forever until windows responds fully, now it seems to respond, and some things do (like desktop icons) but if I press the windows key + E (for explorer) it doesn't come up for maybe 2-3 minutes.

I'm thinking somewhere in the background windows is doing something? Anyone have any ways I can figure out what? My guess is maybe the virus killer or the firewall, if so, bit of a pain, but I can live with it since they are both crucial.

 

it sounds like you have a lot of bloatware on your machine. you might want to consider re-installing windows. that is the best method of getting your system up to speed.

also, what are your laptop specs?

 

Before doing a full re-install, there are some other things, like disabling start up programs, etc.

What programs start when the OS loads? You can look in the "startup" folder and tell us what's listed there. The icons in your systray are also a good indicator of what runs at startup.

Sometimes it's as easy to just disable the startups if you have a lot of things like music programs, programs that automatically update, or the things that put icons in the tray for "easy access" but which take time to load up.

Depending on your antivirus and firewall apps, they shouldn't be adding a whole lot to the start up time, especially after the desktop appears. Which ones are you running? (Norton and Symantec can slow things down quite a bit.)

 

Please do NOT jump to a reinstall.

other than whats been mentioned:
1) For your OS partition, from my computer and right-click to 'properties.' under the first tab, there is an option called disk cleanup. Run that utility first, as it will remove a bit of junk for the next step.

2) Return to the properties box. click on the 'tools' tab. In the second section, you'll see something called "defragment now." Run that tool (involves analyzing and defragmenting). Essentially, it takes all your fragmented files and sort of "rearranges" them appropriately.

3) get TuneXP. After installing it and running it, go to "memory and file system" and then go to "ultra-fast booting (rearrange boot files)" and let it run. This will also take an amount of time, so don't interrupt it for the sake of your computer.

also, to help the rest of us diagnose your problems, can you run task manager and tell us all the tasks that are processes that are using > 20,000 K of memory?

Hope this helps.

 

one possible reason why it takes explorer some time to load is that your laptop might have a slower hard drive and you have a lot of things loading on startup. So windows loads desktop and then goes onto loading other applications that should be launched at startup. At this time the HD light is ON solid and the computer is cranking away. Windows will not let you load any MS (and some other) apps until its done. That's why it takes explorer 2-3minutes to come up.

So as others have suggested, first thing to try would be to make sure that you don't have a lot of crap loading on startup (via msconfig). Another thing to try would be do defragment your hard drive.

 

it is so true .... well said!

cheers ...