Win 7 slow to boot and unusable

[turbo6]

Problem: Win 7 began crashing and now takes an hour to boot. Upon booting system is so slow it's unusable. The disk light on the laptop is constantly working.

Specs: Win 7 Home Premium. HP Pavilion G7 1219WM laptop. Slow 1.6mhz processor but this is even more ridiculous than usual.

Tried: Basically all F8 options. Repair, last known good configuration, system restore to weeks prior. AVG scan is clean. MalwareBytes deleted a few keys and a file. Trendmicro scan is clean. Tried a Windows update but the boot issue seems to keep it from properly configuring. Chkdsk yielded nothing. I can't seem to /scannow my C drive, says I have an update pending.

I can boot to safe mode, despite a very long boot. Windows does function in that environment. My disk light does not constantly flash when in safe mode.

Shutting down results in a blue screen message saying preparing to configure Windows. So not only is there an issue with booting, it seems to stuck in some sort of failed update loop.

Any ideas?

 

[Mellon Head]

I have seen very slow boot and use performance when a drive is going bad.

Are you letting the computer finish its update cycle on shutdown? It may take a long time, but that might allow you to run sfc/scannow without a problem.

Please fill out your system specs so that we can give more detailed help.

What is the brand and model of the drive? If it's a Seagate, you can use something like SeaTools to scan the drive for problems. It's much more thorough than Chkdsk. Western Digital has a similar utility.

 

[turbo6]

Microprocessor
1.65GHz VISION E2 Technology from AMD with AMD Dual-Core E-450 Accelerated Processor
Microprocessor Cache
1MB L2 Cache
Memory
4GB DDR3 SDRA
Hard Drives
HDD
500GB
HDD RPM
5400RPM
HDD Interface
SATA

support.hp.com/us-en/document/c02974952

I think it's a Hitachi drive? I'll double check once I boot again.

I believe it did complete a full start and shut down after the update, unless it crashed... I let it run overnight. However Windows still thinks it's pending.

 

[turbo6]

Bingo. It was the hard drive.

 

[Mellon Head]

Glad you got it figured out.

 

[gregrocker]

I would buy an SSD which is the best upgrade you can do for Windows 7, then do a perfect Clean Reinstall Windows 7

You'll have a vastly better install than putting the HP Factory image back on the new drive, larded with the worst load of bloatware in the industry.

 

[turbo6]

Thanks for the replies.

For now I simply swapped an old hard drive from a Gateway I had and began updating the drivers.

I'm running Vista for now. I have No idea where my HP recovery disk is, or if it even had one. If anything I'll probably just get a new laptop in the future. The 17 inch screen is nice, but the processor is anaemic on this thing. [emoji1]

 

[gregrocker]

If you're running the factory install on that PC then you have no idea how it would run with the much preferred clean reinstall. You cannot judge a PCs performance when it has the worst install of Windows 7 possible. What we know is that every PC runs almost twice as fast when the factory image is replaced.