Hotfixes

seekermeister said:

Thanks, I had paid more attention to the way that it was listed on the download page, where it was not so explicit. That one is a go.

I'm sorry you lost me. Does that mean you're going to give it a go.

If you do, don't forget to to a system restore first. Although some hotfixes/updates do it automatically you just want to be sure it done.

Agree, but he stated he didn't want to install SP1

seekermeister said:

Unfortunately, it is designed for SP1. which I have not, nor intend to install.

sygnus21 said:

seekermeister said:

Thanks, I had paid more attention to the way that it was listed on the download page, where it was not so explicit. That one is a go.

I'm sorry you lost me. Does that mean you're going to give it a go.

If you do, don't forget to to a system restore first. Although some hotfixes/updates do it automatically you just want to be sure it done.

Yes, I just applied that hotfix. I think that it has helped, but it is not absolutely clear, because boot time varies so much on my machine. After 3 reboots, it appears that it is averaging ~ 116 seconds now, which still leaves a lot of room for improvement.

Going through the boot logs in the Event Viewer is not terribly helpful, because it only logs 4 or less items effecting boot time on each boot, and the total time of all of them is not even close to the amount of lag involved. Soluto wasn't very helpful either, but it did provide some extra information that the Event Viewer didn't.

Something that I don't understand is that both monitors sometimes list a lag caused by wmpnetwork, but when I used Soluto to delay that, it still popped up on boot time. I then disabled it in services, and yet it still runs on boot.

This is not the major delay in booting, but since tweaking this is a matter of whittling a few seconds at a time, I would like to eliminate it altogether. How can that be done, when disabling it's service doesn't?

Have you tried running Microsoft's Boot tracer that's in the Windows SDK? I found out the reason behind my glacial boot time was one of the services included in recent Catalyst drivers and disabling it cut boot times in half.

I have Windows SDK 7.0 installed, and going through it's Start Menu directory, I didn't find anything called Boot Tracer...where would I find it?

With the issues you're having I really don't see what the harm is in installing SP1. Honestly I don't see the system getting worse and I can say for myself that I haven't lost any performance or had any issues when I installed SP1.

At any rate its obviously your decision, I just thought i'd throw that out there.

Other then that have you looked into the motherboard or chipset drivers?

I have the latest chipset drivers installed, but that isn't saying much, because Asus hasn't updated them in quite a while, since my mb is an old S939. Since boot time has always been an issue, it is possible that the drivers are part of the issue, but I doubt that they are causing the more recent problems with increases in time.

If a driver is the root of the problem, I would tend to suspect the Nvidia driver, because of the crashing aspect seemingly being related to graphical/video display instances. However, I am updated to the latest driver, and the problem is the same as it was with the previous one. However, I did have a problem with the update, because Windows insisted on installing the driver via Windows Update, and when I attempted to reinstall it with the driver that I downloaded from Nvidia, the installation failed.

When I used Driver Sweeper, and then booted into Safe Mode, so that Windows Update wasn't accessible, it then automatically scanned for the driver and installed it, regardless of what I tried to stop it, but it does show that the latest driver is installed, but it must still be the one from Windows Update, since my driver installation failed. Then again, I'm not sure that is entirely true, because the portion that failed was Physx, but it appeared that the rest of the driver may have installed...I don't know.

I'm sorry to say but you're having some weird software issue there. First off there's no way WU should be "forcing" a video card driver (or any driver for that matter) on you. Then you have performance issues. I don' know, something strange is going on - what? I don't know.

You might consider a fresh install.

Heres how to completely get rid of wmpnetwk.

What exactly is wmpnetwk.exe And is it Working? « Kozar Cool Blog

Also, if you dont share media via wmp, disable media sharing.

Media Sharing Using Windows Media Player - Enable or Disable