Solved Really Slow shutdown and startup

[ericgeil]

My wife's laptop "recently" started taking much longer then usual to shutdown. Normally it would be 20-30 seconds for a full reboot. Now it takes a couple of minutes to shut down, and a couple of minutes to boot. I have tried updating drivers, disabling services and startup items, disabling drivers, setting "verbose" mode to see more detail about what stage the hang is taking place, and many other suggestions. None of which has yielded any information whatsoever.

I came across this tutorial:

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorial...up-shutdown-sleep-hibernate-reboot-trace.html

I was hoping that someone could assist by reviewing the log that was created by the Windows Performance Toolkit.


Any takers? Let me know, any I can post a link. Fair warning, it's 133 Mb zipped ( 962 Mb unzipped). This is for the "boot" trace. I was getting errors creating the others, so I figured that would at least be a place to start,

Thanks in advance. This is driving me insane....

 

[whs]

When you have the trace results, post them here. We will be glad to look at it.

It would also be useful if you could post the list of all your startup programs. And for a test, disable all startups and reboot. What is the result??

 

[ericgeil]

The log file is at :

http://www.**************/download/..._PRIORITY_REGISTRY_FILE_IO_FILE_IO_INIT_1.zip

Startup items from msconfig startup tab:
F-secure Common Client Foundation (fshoster32.exe)
F-Secure Management Agent (FSM32.exe)
GoogleToolbarNotifier (GoogleToolbarNotifier.exe)
Intel Common User Interface (igfxpers.exe)
Intel Common User Interface (igfxtray.exe)
Intel Common User Interface (hkcmd.exe)
Intel USB 3.0 monitor (iusb3mon.exe)
Intel Wireless Bluetooth (rundll32.exe -> btmshellex.dll)
Synaptics Pointing Device Driver (SynTPEnh.exe) (appears 2 times, from different folders)
Toshiba Flash Cards (TCrdMain.exe) (appears 2 times, from different folders)
Toshiba Sleep (TSleepsrv.exe)

Thanks!

 

[ericgeil]

For some reason the domain is getting masked in my link. Replace the *********** with m e d i a f i r e d o t c o m.

 

[whs]

A domain link gets disabled by the forum engine.

You have a typical Toshibe junk list of startups. Disable them all for a test. Easiest with CCleaner - in Tools > Startup.

 

[ericgeil]

Tried disabling everything from startup, and as many services as possible, but it didn't make any difference.

When shutting down, it hangs on the blue screen that says "shutting down", with the blue spinning icon.

When booting up, the windows logo appears and says "Starting Windows". This happens quickly, and only appears for a few seconds, then the screen goes black for a long time (over a minute), then the login screen appears.

When the machine is up and running, there are no issues. The machine is very fast and responsive. It's only the shutdown and boot times that are an issue.

Machine specs:
Toshiba Satellite L850
Core i7-3610QM quad core processor
Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit
6 Gb ram
OCZ 256Gb SSD

Finally, I was able to run the shutdown and reboot traces:

Shutdown
http://www.**************/download/...CE+PERF_COUNTER+POWER+PRIORITY+REGISTRY_1.zip

Reboot
http://www.**************/download/...CE+PERF_COUNTER+POWER+PRIORITY+REGISTRY_1.zip

 

[ericgeil]

Any suggestions? About all I can add at this point is that the startup portion moves a little quicker if I do a reboot as opposed to shutdown and cold start. In other words, Shutdown + Cold Boot is noticeably slower than a reboot.

 

[whs]

Can you please post a picture of your disk management. I have a suspicion and like to check.

 

[ericgeil]

Attached...

 

[cluberti]

Sorry, I'm seeing this just now and those traces are no longer available for download. Would you be able to upload them again perhaps, or take new ones and upload those?

 

[whs]

Disk management shows no problem. Is that a HDD or a SSD. And as Cuberti said, the traces would be useful.

 

[ericgeil]

I shared them again, though it showed them as stil shared, so I'm not sure what's up. Let me know if you can't reach them still (domain is still m e d i a f i r e d o t c o m):

http://www.**************/download/...CE+PERF_COUNTER+POWER+PRIORITY+REGISTRY_1.zip
http://www.**************/download/..._PRIORITY_REGISTRY_FILE_IO_FILE_IO_INIT_1.zip
http://www.**************/download/...CE+PERF_COUNTER+POWER+PRIORITY+REGISTRY_1.zip

 

[cluberti]

Shutdown trace:
The pantech modem service is delaying the service portion of shutdown far more than any other service, but that's only 3 seconds (shutdown appears to only take 13 seconds, which isn't horrible). However, I notice the system is running MediaFire desktop (and the service is a "permanent" one), including the NTFS monitor. Unless this is absolutely needed, I wouldn't be running that anywhere near a system I wanted to perform well. Otherwise, there's nothing here in the shutdown trace that stands out at all other than those things.


Faster (~31 seconds) boot trace:
The boot traces appear to take about 30 seconds. The preboot/winlogon portion (~the first 15 seconds) shows the majority of that time spent on antivirus process activity (Charter Security Suite, Norton PC Checkup, a few misc tools). Get that nonsense off the box pronto.

The post winlogon/shell times (logon, explorer starts and finishes loading) are also ~15 seconds, and the majority of that time is spent doing things like starting IOBit driver booster, the Intel Management Engine components (do you really need those?), but the MediaFire app is hitting the CPU far harder than anything else (exacerbated by the poor security suite software as well). Also, SearchIndexer.exe is hitting the disk during logon, which could indicate a large amount of content in the user's documents/music/etc. folders, or the need for a cache purge and re-index.

I can't necessarily explain why things got worse, but I can tell you what I'd do if it was my machine - I'd remove any and all Charter apps (including Norton) and replace them with something lightweight (or just leave the Windows firewall and Defender running), MediaFire, and potentially the Intel ME software as well, to start.


Slow (~90 second) boot trace:
It appears that all of the time is spent in ReadyBootIO - However, the hit/miss ratio is very good, and there's a noticeable (~66 second) gap here. In looking at the rest of the data, the delay is pretty noticeable after the Synaptic touchpad driver service starts, and the Intel Management Engine processes (UMS and LMS exes) start. There's little activity otherwise while those 3 take their sweet time getting going.

 

[ericgeil]

Also, it's an SSD. One of the DVDs is a mounted ISO, FYI.

 

[whs]

One other thing you might want to do is to check the SSD alignment.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/113967-ssd-alignment.html?ltr=S

 

[ericgeil]

Wow, great info. Thanks! I will do some digging on those items and see if I can make a dent in the times. A couple of things:

Charter's security suite is F-secure, not Norton. Interestingly, I don't have anything from Norton installed at all, so that's something...

Meanwhile, any suggestions for a replacement for the charter AV? I'm basically using it because it's free, but have no particular loyalty there. I've used MS security essentials before with no issues. Should I try that? Something else you recommend? On a side note, and just FYI, I've had Charter's AV since day 1 on this machine and never had the slow shutdown / boot issues.

Also, I only installed the media fire for the purposes of posting the files to this thread, so while it may be "a" problem, it wouldn't be "the" problem. Either way, uninstalling now .

Thanks again, and happy new year:drool:! I'll post back here as soon as I do some digging.

 

[whs]

Why don't you use MSE. It is free too. But before you do, use the F-secure uninstaller. This is a must.

Microsoft Security Essentials - Microsoft Windows

 

[ericgeil]

I checked the alignment on the SSD...It shows offset of 1024 KB, which is apparently ok.

I also uninstalled media fire, disabled Charter (didn't uninstall yet, pending finding a replacement), and disabled anything synaptic and intel. So far no change, it's running about 70 sec shut down and 70 sec start up.

The 66 second gap you mentioned lines up nicely with what I'm seeing at startup. The windows logo appears, then the screen goes totally off (not just "projecting" black, but OFF off... I can see what looks like liquid draining from the screen if there's a glare on it), and it stays like that for just over a minute, then the login screen comes up pretty quickly after that, and the machine is greased lightning again. Any thoughts on what is causing that state? It's like the computer just goes to sleep for a solid minute, mid-startup...

 

[whs]

Here is a test program you could try. https://www.soluto.com/boot-time

 

[ericgeil]

I uninstalled f-secure, and thought I had encouraging news, but then it sort of reverted back:

45 second shut down
15 second boot
3 second shutdown (yes, really - this is how quick it used to be at one point)
then back to roughly 80 second boots and 45 second shutdowns

(boot = zero-to-login-prompt)
(shutdown starts when the "shutting down" message appears)

The black screen is pretty much that same 66-ish seconds every time. It just didn't do it the one time for some reason. It does not do this on a restart, only on a cold boot.

Good thing it's new years, as I am in need of a cocktail