Vista slow startup (was fast...now slow)

[727stretch]

This is kind of a continuation to my other thread on SP1 slowing my HP notebook down.

Fast forward...I ended up formatting & reinstalling Vista (without SP1). Since then, I have cleaned up all the bloatware, installed all Windows & HP updates and done all my usual system tweaks to the registry and other settings (for speed). The newly installed OS has been running now for about 2 weeks. System is well kept (defrag'd, cleaned out, etc.).:confused:

Prior to installing SP1 on my prior installation of Vista, the startup was super fast - 35-40 seconds - with the same # of services and startup programs and the same tweaks.

Now, with the new installation, I'm averaging 90-100 seconds boot up time! Again, with the same tweaks. I've reboted about 250 times since the install, so I'm sure Vista Superfetch & prefetch have had a chance to do their thing.

In the bit of analysis I've done, via the event viewer, a lot of notices are showing up stating that various services and drivers are "degrading" the boot up speed. What's up with that? I mean, why would a driver degrade the boot speed? Especially when it did not degrade the speed before...

Any suggestions or troubleshooting tips are much appreciated.

[loki]

In the bit of analysis I've done, via the event viewer, a lot of notices are showing up stating that various services and drivers are "degrading" the boot up speed. What's up with that? I mean, why would a driver degrade the boot speed? Especially when it did not degrade the speed before...

In their testing of SP1, Microsoft found that there were problems with some third party drivers, though they never listed which ones. This is also why SP1 was released in March, even though it was finished in February. Apparently they wanted to give the third party companies time to update their drivers.

Why would the drivers be slower now? Probably due to the changes in SP1, including updates to the Windows kernel (the core of the operating system).

[727stretch]

Just to clarify, I formatted my HD and did not install SP1...

More details here on what the event viewer says is slowing down the boot-up performance (the 100-series event codes):

"Application of user policy caused a slowdown in the system start up process:
PreShellInit. Degradation time: 2462ms"

"Logon.ui took longer than usual to start up. Degradation time: 451ms"

"Servicehost.exe took longer than usual to start up. Degradation time: 832ms"

"SessionMgrInit caused a slow down in the start up process. Degradation time: 2452ms"

"Background optimizations (prefetching) took longer to complete, resulting in a performance degradation in the system start up process. Degradation time: 42495ms"

So as you can see, it looks like a lot of this stuff is being caused by OS features and not by drivers/add-ons (at least that I know of). This is probably beyond most folks knowledge, but if there are any techies in the know, feel free to share :)

[loki]

Can't remember if you mentioned this, but is DMA enabled for your hard drives? If it got disabled, your hard drive performance would be suffering and slow down the computer in general.

[727stretch]

Can't remember if you mentioned this, but is DMA enabled for your hard drives? If it got disabled, your hard drive performance would be suffering and slow down the computer in general.

Thanks for that interesting suggestion loki but DMA was enabled. :)

I'm really stumped on this one. I formatted & re-installed exactly the way you're supposed to, processed all windows updates except SP1, installed all HP driver updates and here I am. No matter how many startup programs I enable or disable, the darn thing still takes 100+ sec to get from power on to the desktop screen...

[xxmikexx]

727stretch,

Is there some third party HDD diagnostic you can run? I don't really understand your symptoms but is there a possibility that the system is running CHKDSK for some reason during your boot-up for some reason?