Windows 7: Win 7 running slow after logon for over 5 minutes

Hi, I would appreciate any suggestions etc. I've got Windows 7 64 bit Home user premium on a Compaq Presario Cq61 Laptop. Bootup is reasonable in terms of time and log on screen appears reasonably quickly. The welcome screen takes 1 minute before going to the desktop. After that it runs really slow for about 5 minutes. There is a lot of disc activity but I don't know what service, etc is causing it. I de fragged, run system file checker, used MS config to ensure only 6 startup items and turned off numerous services but still can find out what is running in the background for so long. After 5 mins the machine runs well. I do use Avast anti virus and it loads a definition file on startup. I disabled that setting to manual update only but it made no difference. I don't use any other anti virus. Any ideas how to deal with this?

Is this the factory preinstall with the bloatware and duplicate utilities which have much better versions built into Windows 7? This is a corrupt install to begin with which throttles Windows 7.

If so I would Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7 following the steps to get a perfect install to enjoy Windows 7 native performance.

It is the factory pre install but it used to run a lot quicker. The hard disc failed a year ago so I reinstalled the factory config on a new 0.75 tB disc from back up DVD's I made when I bought the machine. I have been tempted to go back to the factory install yet again but I am worried it could start getting slow again over time so I would rather understand what is causing the block and resolve it. I would also rather avoid having to reinstall the software on the machine if possible as I would have to mess about re registering and relicensing some software like Cubase. I have virtually nothing running in the registry start up areas or in the CC Cleaner startup items or on the MS Cnfig start up, there seems to be a lot of disc activity up tpo 5 mins after logon to Windows. I've run Proc mon but it reports so many events it's difficult to know what is going on. I've disbled a lot of HP Bloatware too. I've got a Boot Monitor log file which indicates total startup time of 224 seconds but I can't see any single event that is much longer than anything else.

HP has the worst load of bloatware in the industry. Even after cleaning it up it still is a corrupt install which no tech enthusiast would run. Since you've come to the top resource on the web for Clean Reinstall why not avail yourself of our help?

What is the problem with software licensing after reinstall? The tutorial explains how to audit all installed software along with Product Keys.

There are steps here to Clean Up Factory Bloatware which might partially mitigate having one of the worst installs possible.

Otherwise you can check over everything by working through these Troubleshooting Steps for Windows 7

Cubase has a fiddly E Licenser system designed to prevent people installing multiple copies of it on different PC's. You have to tell them your drive got corrupted and ask for activation codes etc. Anyway I'm coming round to your way of thinking, I've run Belarc advisor to capture the software I have on my machine and I'm backing up data on to a portable drive in readiness for a reinstall of windows. If I can't track down what is causing the disc activity in a few days I may well take the plunge and reinstall as you argue for. I have disposed of most of the HP bloatware though it has to be said.

I booted in safe mode and found that the background disk activity wasn't there anymore. But it was back on a normal startup.

Then a third party driver is most likely responsible. Work through the troubleshooting steps.

I leave my system on with sleep mode enabled and I had a similar problem. I tracked it down to 2 tasks that started my morning coffee grinding by disk access hogging the system for over 5 minutes. The first was system restore which was scheduled daily but did not have wakeup computer enabled -- note allow wakeup must also be enabled in power settings. I enabled wakeup on this task and set the time to 5:00 AM.

The second was RAC : Microsoft Reliability Analysis task to process system reliability data. This runs every hour and I'm not sure but think it was actually runnning all of the events it had missed while the system was sleeping. I don't have issues to track so I disabled this altogether.

Changes can be made using accessories-system-task scheduler from the start window.

Thanks for both of the suggestions. I'll try Duh's first and report back. If that doesn't work I'll go back to the drivers.

Hmm, in Task scheduler, system restore is triggererd set to run at 00:00 every day and on system start up. In fact there are lots of other things set up in task scheduler that I would want to run through choice such as Windows application experience, perhaps some cleaning up here might help.