Legit Reviews

I built a system back in December '07, and have been having problems with it for many many months. When I boot my system, it seems to be extremely SLOW to load the OS. I have Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit on my drive. I notice that if I give it 5-10 minutes, then she's faster than anything else.... but on that initial boot, she's very very slow. I have checked MSConfig, and there is hardly anything loading, especially services.

Now, here's the real kicker. Say my girlfriend goes into her profile, logs out, and I go into mine. While I'm waiting for my settings to load, it's extremely fast now. This is where I don't want to point the blame at my OS, but rather my HDD. I've got 2x 500GB Seagate 7200.11's in my system (Yes, I'm aware of the firmware situation and my drives aren't affected). I do notice that my second drive takes a bit to access data, the first time I do. I am just brushing this off, as the drive is put to sleep since it's only a storage drive.

Any ideas why my system is extremely slow to load the very first time the PC is on? I'm almost positive, if I were to reboot, it would load really quick also. It's quite annoying actually.

Thanks!

-Brian

P.S. I have Windows 7 on my 32GB Raptor, and that seems to be loading fairly quick... no hang time.




Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit
4x 1GB (I forgot what brand) 1066MHz Memory
2x 500GB 7200.11 Seagate HDD
Asus PE5 Deluxe
Intel Q6600
768MB eVGA GeForce 8800 GTX Superclocked

I've had similar problems in the past with Vista coming out of hibernation but I don't think our issues are related. You say when your girlfriend uses her profile it's nice and fast. Does this include her logging in from a fresh boot, or only when switching users?

BTW, this should have been posted in the OS forum.

Eh, I'm under the assumption this is a hardware issue, not an OS issue, that's why I just posted it in the general forum!

Her profile is fairly slow to load the very first time also.

hmmm it could be that one of the sata data cables is a bit screwy i'd personally change em both and see if that make a difference if it's still taking a long time to boot then one of the drive may not be at all right in the head can you disconnect the affected drive and see if that makes any difference aswell

Athlonite could be right try that and if you still get the same problem then try and run a hard disk burn test and see if you load times and that are slow then have a look on the net for your problem and see if it compares to what your burn test results were.

Hope this helps m8.

Run a defrag on your drives that may help a bit.

You may wanna check and see if there's an updated driver for your SATA controller as that may be the problem. Also, try disabling SMART in the BIOS as that can sometimes delay drive spinup durring posting. I don't think that's really the problem though as it wouldn't delay your boot by 5 minutes.

I don't know if I buy the SATA cables as being the problem as if that were the case you'd like not even get the drives to spin up in the first place. Lets think about this logically. What, is the cable kinked causing the data to backup?

To be honest, what ended up fixing my issues was a fresh install of Vista. If push comes to shove you may have to do just that to fix the issue.

Could just be that bitdefender is running on startup also.

Or another spyware/virus scanner.

Mike

or even if you have some of those above programs set to check for updates at the computers bootup.

@NAiLs,

I know you think that this is hardware related, and it still could be, but I have seen this on many machines, and almost 100 percent of the time, with the exception of my old laptop, it is an OS issue. I suggest that if you want to rule out the hard drive, you run a diagnostic, like the ones on Ultimate Boot CD.
If the hard drive is clean, then back up your hard drive and reinstall Vista. However, I could be proved completely wrong about my OS theory, if your system was behaving like this right after the Vista install.

Hope this is helpful.

Tekgek

THanks for the tips, guys. I'll take a look into each of 'em when I get a chance later this week. I'm on vacation this week, but busy as hell! UGH! I'll let you know my results.

BTW, I've noticed this since clean install, but never really bothered to look into it until now. I don't have much installed on my machine, short of WoW, CS:S, and 1 or 2 other games. Outlook 2007 and AVG also.

wait nails...did you just say you had a girlfriend? lol just messing with ya.

smack323 wrote:wait nails...did you just say you had a girlfriend? lol just messing with ya.

lol... yup! Going on 8 months now. Tom and Keri have met her once before.

Alright, I've gotten a little bit of time to observe load times, but not a ton of test time. I guess if someone can chime in on this first. When Vista loads, and you are sitting at the Login screen, is it loading all of those stupid processes right then and there, or only when you actually log into a profile? Reason why I ask this, is because if I turn on my PC, let it sit for 10 minutes and attempt to log in, my PC is faster than anything else. If I try to log in immediately (or 1-2 minutes after) after it gets to the login screen, that's when it's slower than molasses. The loading of system files into memory or just loading period is what I"m unsure of at this point. If that's the case, then it's just Vista being a piece of crap (or fragmented files that it won't move around). If it's not, then I would have to assume something with the physical hard drive itself.

Anyone care to chim in, please? :-D

-Brian

I get the same thing as well,..it's not as bad with my new rig so I wouldn't put it on the Hard drive..I don't know the specifics but I would say it is the processes loading..I do get the same thing as you though on both my old and new rig with Vista

NAiLs wrote:Alright, I've gotten a little bit of time to observe load times, but not a ton of test time. I guess if someone can chime in on this first. When Vista loads, and you are sitting at the Login screen, is it loading all of those stupid processes right then and there, or only when you actually log into a profile? Reason why I ask this, is because if I turn on my PC, let it sit for 10 minutes and attempt to log in, my PC is faster than anything else. If I try to log in immediately (or 1-2 minutes after) after it gets to the login screen, that's when it's slower than molasses. The loading of system files into memory or just loading period is what I"m unsure of at this point. If that's the case, then it's just Vista being a piece of crap (or fragmented files that it won't move around). If it's not, then I would have to assume something with the physical hard drive itself.

Anyone care to chim in, please? :-D

-Brian

From experience, it's loading some processes in the background while you're still on the log in screen. One of the reasons, I don't touch my laptop right away after turning it on. For my computer, one of the services it loads while it's waiting is internet. If I log in before Vista's done with its thing, laptop's wifi isn't connected and I get a ton of messages regarding missing (mapped) network drive.

Well, I finally got sleep mode to work again... after some tweaking, and I confirmed it is not a hardware issue. With everything powering down and back up again, with Vista already loaded, my mail client was receiving e-mail 1, 2, 3... and LR loaded in 2 seconds of me logging back into my account. So, I'm down to Vista being a big pile of poop and killing my system at boot. Now to figure out exactly what is killing my system at boot...

Any tips are appreciated!

-Brian