Windows 7: Suddenly windows takes much longer to start

So the trace has been done, and unfortunately the file is 1.3gb large, so not gonna really be able to upload that anywhere. I'll take some screenshots of some of the graphs though, and if anyone is able/willing to help or needs more data or other things to be traced (drivers?), do let me know and I'll be glad to provide more information that may help solve the problem.

From what I can tell, the winlogon phase seems to be taking too long (>100 secs). But depsite the number of services & processes running, there appears to be basically nothing going on for the last 50secs or so of this period, other than one instance of svchost spiking in the middle of it. Also, 90+% disk utilization doesn't sound very healthy...?

Anyway, the screenshots I took are below. Any assistance over this would be greatly welcome!
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/22729417/Trace%20SS.zip



Thanks!

dita:


upload the file to a server like free Skydrive with each Windows Live/Hotmail ID. Then post a link in the Trace tutorial for the author's help. He will hopefully see it.

There were other options provided and your best choice is still to Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7

g

Thanks! File is compressed and slowly uploading, and I'll post a comment in the thread later, and hopefully it can be identified if it's a hardware problem or just crap on the system. The concern wasn't not having somewhere to upload the file to, but rather having bad upload speeds from my current location.

In the meantime, I'll probably go about disabling them services and startups for efficiency's sake. Still want to avoid reinstalling as far as possible as I don't really feel I can currently afford the downtime that reinstalling windows and all programs would entail.

Repeating a question from earlier, though, in disabling services, the troubleshooting guide says to do it in msconfig. If services have been unchecked in msconfig do they need to be set to manual in services.msc as well? Conversely, if they are already set to a manual start, do they still need to be unchecked?

Thanks very much again greg =)

When you are in msconfig/Services go to the lower left corner and put a check mark in the box (Hide All Microsoft Services). It will show 3rd party services at that point. The only thing I have checked is my security program. I highly recommend not messing with Microsoft Services.

Yes, I did notice that mentioned in the tutorial guide. What I meant was if the non-MS services need to be disabled through services.msc as well or not, or if one or the other would be enough and they achieve the same effect.

Unrelatedly, cute sig!

Msconfig will handle everything needed, as per the tutorial. Stick with it.

I see you've posted in the tutorial thread but I've heard the author Carl may be literally swamped by Sandy besides his busy travel schedule with MS. If you don't hear from him I would post it also in the forums which originally hosted the Trace to ask for help there from his colleagues who are expert in this specialized field: Trace Windows 7 boot/shutdown/hibernate/standby/resume issues - MSFN Forum

You don't have to do anything but remove the check mark while you are in msconfig/Startup and or msconfig/Services and do a reboot. Remember this does not stop these things it just stops them for running at boot until you or Windows tells them to work.
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Example:
At times you use Alpha program but you have it unchecked in Startup and Services. You will still be able to use it when you want to just by tick on the program Alpha (or its icon) or you tick on check for updates for Alpha. When you are done with program Alpha you just close it and it stops and does not run in the background when not needed. This is the method many of us use to control what runs when and what is updated when. The program you unchecked isn't moved or removed and you can always check it again if you decide to.
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Thank you; the sig was made by ARC.

So this evening I had the time to uninstall symantec, and remove the startup programs/services/etc. However, this only presented minor reductions in boot time, and was still slower than it used to be, even when there were ~10 more startups running.

Was going to post the above, then noticed this thread with similar symptoms. Thought I'd try out his observation and disable the network adaptors and reboot. And suddenly startup times are back being wonderful again, ~5+ secs between login and the full desktop. No clue why establishing a connection would be a big issue (maybe behind the whole problem?), but I guess I'll monitor the other thread and poke around to see if some drivers or something need updating.

Will also monitor the boot trace thread and move it to the other forums if necessary. Thanks for the suggestion, greg.

You've never answered if this is preinstalled factory OEM Windows 7 with all the bloatware.

In the time this has taken you could already have the perfect Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7
to enjoy Windows 7's performance which you'll never have the the corrupt factory preinstall.

Yes this is the original installed version of windows, though most of the preinstalled apps have been removed long ago. Sorry that I've not taken your recommendation to reinstall windows, but I've just not felt that I've had the several hours it'd need to create the boot disc and reinstall all my programs, since programs and OS are on the same partition. It might be something I'll try in the future when I've more time, but was not absolutely necessary in this case as the performance before have been sufficient for my purposes.

Anyway, I'm going to go ahead and mark this as solved. Think I've found the problem to be a hard drive on the network that was moved to another server but was still mapped, causing windows to query the drive repeatedly till timeout, before loading the desktop. After unmapping it I'm back to ~40 seconds from the power button and ~5 seconds from login, which is good enough for me. Will continue to monitor, but hopefully this was what brought about the problems to begin with.

In the meantime, some programs had trouble running after disabling all the non-MS services in msconfig, so I went into services.msc and changed some of them from disabled (due to msconfig) to manual. I would imagine that this shouldn't cause slowdowns since it's still disabled at startup, but please correct me if I'm wrong.

Once again, big thanks to everyone who helped out in this thread! =)

P.S. Did not realise that there were actual MS staff helping out here, like cluberti you mentioned. Is this actually an official support forum or just a community one?