Windows 7 Ultimate Boot

Hi,

I find my boot into Windows 7 Ultimate (SP1) Alienware laptop is quite slow. Granted I don't have an SSD, my hard drive is a single 750 gig 7,200 drive but it still alarms me. From cold boot to login screen is quite quick (25 secs) but when I login the 'welcome' screen lingers from between 20 and 35 secs. Once the desktop finally shows everything then proceeds to load pretty quick and become usable & the laptop is blazing quick. It's not as if it's hanging at the welcome screen due to no activity or timing out because I can see that there is hard disk activity.

If I wait a while before logging in (say about 25 secs) then the welcome screen passes much quicker. Checking the event log tends to give an overall boot time average of 120 seconds. I know all about the various quirks, such as the solid colour background bug (which doesn't apply as I use my own jpeg) & have downloaded a couple of hotfixes associated with boot time improvement. However nothing makes a difference. I tried a cold boot disabling all start up programs and all non microsoft services and it was no different. However, Safe mode does boot in much quicker.

I have even tried Soluto (which is a good way of trimming start up programs). What is clear to me from this is 3rd party programs are not the problem. I think it's the Microsoft services slowing things down. There are about 50-60 of them running at start up & they take up probably 90% of the boot time. Now I know it's fine to try and disable 3rd party stuff but disabling MS services seems like a bad idea especially as I use a home network (I have no domains) set up. It's unclear what services are critical or not. Is it the nature of Windows 7 Ultimate to be a bit of a slow booter? As far as I know my laptop has always been this way from the minute I received it from Alienware. I'm sure people with netbooks have a faster boot than me! Although they do prob run 7 home rather than 7 ultimate. My wife's laptop running 7 home is similar slow & this is a dell laptop. Seeing as Dell & Alienware are one and the same maybe it is down to their design and the included stock HDD is a bit sub par.

I thought Windows 7 should be a bit faster at boot. My Vista Home Premium laptop doesn't have the Welcome screen delay. Although looking at the event log it clocks a similar overall boot time of about 120 secs. Do I have an issue with my machine?

Many thanks,
Wayne

Plenty of good advice from Microsoft here:

Optimize Windows 7 for better performance

What if you would disable paging files on the hdd?

Hi Golden,

Many thanks for the reply. We both use McAfee. Unfortunately I have posted this whilst away from home so cannot provide a list yet. I would naturally blame McAfee but seeing as I still have the slight delay doing a clean boot makes me think it is not to blame?

Thanks,
Wayne

Even if you start with a minimal set of startup entries, there are other ways for services and drivers installed by 3rd-party software to start up with the system even when not needed. However that's not likely to cause the long boot times you're experiencing.

It could even be superfluous tasks in Task Scheduler that are set to run at boot time (or at user login) but aren't really necessary.

When was the last time you defragged your HD? I could imagine that Superfetch/Prefetch have trouble keeping up if there's too much fragmentation around.

McAfee is another possible candidate...if you haven't disabled/uninstalled it, maybe it's a good idea to try. I know other forum members will be happy to recommend other security software such as Microsoft Security Essentials to you, so that's probably the best thing to try for now.

Hi all,

Again thanks for the responses. What I mean by clean boot is I went into Msconfig and disabled all start up items and then disabled all services apart from the Microsoft ones. So I'd imagine doing this squashed McAfee unless it still manages to squeeze processes in despite the clean boot. But yes, I would really appreciate it if Cluberti can help me out. I will ensure I am ready with the requisite file with regards hardware specs.

I'll check task scheduler and the defrag (although I already did that and am 100% defragmented). Maybe McAfee is the culprit. Just sods law that I am paid up on another years subscription (did an 18 month tenure when I first got the machine).

Many thanks,
Wayne

MucAfee is the worst bloatware AV of all, causing problems we solve here regularly by having users replace it with MSE or Avast6 freeware. That would be the first suspect.

If you are that tuned into the performance of your PC then you should do what most tech enthusiasts do and clean reinstall Win7 in it's lean native state without the factory preinstalled bloatware which weighs it down: Reinstalling Windows 7

Until then you can use these tips to clean up a factory preinstall: Clean up factory bloatware