Slow bootup on new laptop

Bumpkin said:

After hiding the Microsoft services, disable the remaining services by clicking on each service, don't click "Disable all".

The computer should boot a little faster, but it won't be anything like having a SSD.

Yeah that's what happened. I went through and disabled them one by one and rebooted. It's slightly faster but a lot slower than my old Core 2 Duo HP that's also using Windows 7.

Any other suggestions?

Win7 is a driver-complete OS in the installer and quickly updated when you run all rounds of Important and Optional Updates, after enabling Automatically get recommended drivers and updates for your hardware (Step 3) . I would not reimport any drivers except those that are missing after all updates are completed. This is not XP.

Follow these steps to get a perfect Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7.

gregrocker said:

Win7 is a driver-complete OS in the installer and quickly updated when you run all rounds of Important and Optional Updates, after enabling Automatically get recommended drivers and updates for your hardware (Step 3) . I would not reimport any drivers except those that are missing after all updates are completed. This is not XP.

Follow these steps to get a perfect Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7.

Thanks gregrocker but I did all that. I never downloaded any device drivers from Microsoft. I got them all strictly from Dell. The Dell WIn7 .ISO that came with it had no crapware or bloatware loaded on it and it booted pretty fast before I started installing the drivers from Dell. I deliberately blew the recovery partition off in the process because I knew it would contain Dell bloatware if I used that to re-image the machine

It looks like these Intel storage drivers than I posted in my original post are the culprit, as well as those USB 3.0 drivers, which I'm surprised aren't built into the device drivers on the motherboard. I never had USB 2.0 drivers show up in msconfig like these 3.0 drivers do. It's treating it as if they were external ExpressCards.

Not to mention the lackluster performance off this Seagate drive that came with it.

It seems I have three options. I could:

1.) Clone and swap the Seagate off with a new spare blank Western Digital Caviar Black 7200rpm 320GB drive that I have lying around, but I'm skeptical this would make much difference.

2.) Go the SSD route which would mean spending even more money. Not to mention I still have a couple of issues with SSDs, or...

3.) Return the machine to Dell since I'm still within the 30 days.

More feedback from you all would be welcome before I make a decision. Thanks.

Do another Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7 to measure boot time before and after installing all rounds of Important and Optional Updates. Don't forget to enable Automatically get recommended drivers and updates for your hardware (Step 3)

Once all Updates are done post back a screenshot of your Device Manager, provide Dell tag number so we can help you select the missing drivers.

Then measure reboot time after each Dell driver and each program install.

Don't judge boot time on reboots where updates are installed in boot mode.

If you still have slow boot try Gathering a Startup, Shutdown, Sleep, Hibernate, or Reboot Trace - Windows 7 Forums

gregrocker said:

Do another Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7 to measure boot time before and after installing all rounds of Important and Optional Updates. Don't forget to enable Automatically get recommended drivers and updates for your hardware (Step 3)

So you're saying don't download or install any drivers from Dell's website? Let Microsoft search for all the drivers it can?

Did you even read the tutorial? Why ask for our help and then ignore the advice which has made us the top resource on the web for this specialty?

It was just a clarification I asked for, that's all. Nothing personal.

A simple re-image of the machine should have improved performance but in this case it didn't. I've done this many times in the past with new machines and it's always worked.

So I returned the machine today for the reasons I mentioned in #13. I'm tired of f#@king with it.

But thanks for your help anyway. And have a good day.

Sometimes wiping the HD with Diskpart Clean Command can clear boot code from a prior install that's interfering, which can explain why a known-good image won't match its previous performance.

Sorry for your bad luck.