very slow startups

I have been having very slow startups for a very long time and am finally frustrated enough to figure out what the deal is. I have a pretty fast computer but the startups are very slow. I actually have noticed they have been very slow ever since i got rid of the hard drive that came with my T61 and put in my own 200 gb 7200 rpm hd. The original hd was only 40 gb 5400 rpm but startups were much faster. I have tried changing my startup programs but they havent affected anything. I am going to defrag my hd to see if that makes a difference but i was wondering if anyone had any suggestions.

Things that may be of help

I also have 3 gb of memory , turbo memory, and a 2.0 ghz centrino pro.
I am also dual booting linux ubuntu but rarely use it
I constantly switch between a docking station with two lcd monitors where i dont use the laptop screen and then when i take the laptop to class and do use the screen

 

Do you have Vista?

 

yeah sorry its vista 64 bit ultimate

 

Hey Atyrrell, I am having similar problems, you can check out what people have suggested to me thus far http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=166532&page=97.

Hopefully it might solve your problem, if not I'm all ears along with Atyrrell b/c I just ordered a 7200 drive, and I would hate to have my startup time increase from 3 minutes

 

Defragging your computer will definitely help boot times. I have also heard that turbo memory actually increases boot time. And in my opinion, i think you your computer would be better off without it, you have 3 gigs of ram, you don't need turbo memory. If your computer is using turbo memory instead of your ram, you are losing out on speed. Ram is significantly faster. I'm pretty sure turbo memory is for systems with very low ram.

How long ago did you replace the hard drive/install vista?

 

Have you looked at the Top Vista Tweaks sticky?

 

My suggestion is try to format and see how the performance will fly.

You never know, maybe the old HDD drivers is conflicting with your current driver.

Do a clean install. Not a backup restore image.

 

s0ap: defrag of files, and then registry, and then boot files unfortunately did nothing for my boot times

I'm a lost cause

 

Maybe you can find something like Bootvis for Vista?
Bootvis tended to work good for speeding up things in XP. Though I heard stories of people who's systems got wrecked by it.

 

There are apps like Tuneup 2008 where one can remove or disable start up files this would help your start up time. Spybot which is free has a start up section where one can disable files also..

 

the big question is where does take time to load?

Take another computer that is working well and time the length between each screen change...now do the same with yours.

Where are they appreciably different

I was working on a computer just the other day that had a "slow" startup. When I sat down I was expecting the need to disable services, programs and hunt through the event logs for errors, but when I turned on the person's machine what happened is the machine was hanging on the "splash" screen for HP for 1 minute. Huh? They had replaced a drive just as you had and the machine bios was getting stuck during hardware detection, because it still had some residual memory of the old drive due to autodetect not working properly.

I removed all drives and started the machine, blanking all the drives in bios, then reinstalled the drives.

Hardware detection went from 1 minutes to less than 15 seconds.

The point of my post is, describing WHERE the slowdown occurs greatly improves your chance at a solution. There are multiple phases of the startup process--more than most people expect, especially with 64-bit

 

Hey gerry, this is interesting and is starting to wreak of my symptoms. Would you mind checking out all the info I've posted here:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=166532&page=97

I have dual-booted with the same drive (no changes), but perhaps when I partitioned something went amiss.

 

try booting in safe mode, and see if it is quicker. If it is significantly quicker, i would recommend a fresh install. Because finding the driver/drivers giving you problems might be difficult.

p.s. I think it is good practice to defrag your computer before installing a dual boot.

 

I defraged the hd and am still getting slow load times

I timed the seperate parts and here are my results(sorry of the lack of knowledge on this area)

After choosing Vista in the dual boot screen it took 20 seconds to load the welcome screen. The welcome screen stayed up for 30 seconds. I then have a blank, black screen with the mouse cursor showing for 1 minute. My desktop then pos up but is inactive for about 2 minutes. If I click on anything it will not pop up untill these 2 minutes are over.

 

press the win key and R...a run command will pop up...type in msconfig and go to the startup tab and uncheck stuff you don't need. another suggestion is getting a free program called startup inspector which tells you if the startup entries are needed or not. Also go to the boot tab in msconfig and change the time-out from 30 to 3 seconds. Restart, and enjoy =D.

also, upon restart windows say items blocked from starting up....enable that item to start, and click on the don't show this message on boot.

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=166532

BAM.

 

Already linked to Vista Tweaks thread earlier, but whatever

 

...twice

 

Woah... sorry guys! Sometimes I skim threads too quickly.

 

do you guys think my times are bad enough for a clean install? im just wondering how much it would help and what my ideal startup should be? I dont use linux anymore anyways so it would be nice to use my entire hard drive again

 

Abso-freakin-loutely!!! Those times are VERY long. If you have the things necessary to do a clean install, by all means, do so!!

Gary

 

...I'm getting a new harddrive in a couple days. I contemplated transferring images over, but I'm going to bite the bullet and do a clean install...mostly b/c I'd rather not have to sit and debug my startup quandries...at least I know about how long it will take me to get my system installed and running. With all the possibililties with what is wrong with my setup right now, who knows how long it will take to discover the true problem.

So if you want, we could have a clean install party. I'll bring the chips and dip.

 

yeh i think im gonna go on with the clean install this weekend. This will get rid of my linux partition and make one happy hard drive too right?

So all i need to do is transfer my music and download drivers for everything to an external hard drive? Is there anyway I can save my playlists in itunes without having to recreate them all again?

My windows cd will recognize its the same computer right?

 

Yes, you can save your itunes goodness. You need to go to your itunes folder and there are two folders, I don't know if you'll need both of them, but I would grab them both:
Itunes library.itl (don't know that you need this one)
Itunes Music Library.xml

I would make sure you install the latest version of itunes now, before you backup those files...or make sure you install the same version of itunes that you have now on your clean install (it may only mattter if you're going from vversion 6 to 7).

Ideally, your music will be located at the same Path
C:USers...../My Music/Itunes or whatever. So if when you install again you can make the path to your music (And your username) identical to what it is now, it will make things easier. If not, then you'll have to edit the .xml file, which isn't that hard, just annoying.

If you need help with that, let me know.