How to diagnose a slow booting laptop

Question

I'm running Windows 7 Pro 64bit on a Dell Precision M4400 laptop and whenever I boot it it takes ages ( >5mins average).

This doesn't seem right as it's a fairly beasty piece of kit, It get's a 5.9 on the WEI with the lowest score being the Hard disk.

Core 2 Duo P8600 @ 2.4GHz
4GB RAM
150GB 7200RPM Hard Disk with 16MB buffer

How can I tell which part(s) of the boot sequence it taking so long so I might disable / avert the issue and improve the boot time?

The machine is part of a Windows Active Directory and I regularly use it outside the corporate network. Neither situation improves performance.

In my user profile on the AD have a login script which mounts 12 network drives using the following commands

net use I: /delete
net use I: \\machine\share /persistent:no

In the startup folder on the start menu I have Sophos and Dropbox. I do have a bunch of services as I'm a developer. There are 2 versions of SQL server, Microsoft Azure developer tools and a few other bits and pieces. Ideally I'd like not to have to disable these; I'd like to see exactly how long each item is taking during boot and make educated decisions from there.

Answer 1

Actions:

• Clean up your hard drive, use Disk Cleanup and CCleaner.
• Defragment your hard drive, try MyDefrag.
• You could set services to start delayed, so they don't interrupt your boot.
• You could set services to start manual, some can run on demand or you can create a start script.

Analyzing:

Soluto is indeed great although it can not be used for troubleshooting every boot-related problem...

Autoruns will allow you to check what starts up in more broadly and in detail, Soluto doesn't show everything.

But if you want to go more low-level you should check out this document about on/off transitions from Microsoft, which you can read to improve your boot by analyzing low-level stuff with XBootMgr from the Windows Performance Toolkit; which can be installed with an installer in the Windows SDK.

For a more high-level approach you could use Process Monitor which also supports boot logging.

Some examples: Did you know that immunizing your computer by blocking a lot of domains through the ZoneDomains registry key or the Hosts file slows down your boot? Did you know that a lot of fonts can also slow down your boot? Did you know that driver X or library Y is causing some delay? Maybe the files being loaded at boot are so defragmented and not placed close to each other? And so on... ;-)

Answer 2

Take a look at http://soluto.com/. One of the devs is a member of this site and posted the link a while back. It seems nice to me and it shows how much each service takes to start. Nothing that msconfig and services.msc can't do, but it's more user-friendly and memorizes changer so you can easily revert.

Answer 3

if the hardrive is the lowert score then this could be it as windows loads up from the hardrive, but this doesnt make sense because its 7200 rpm, but however if the hardrive is not a good make then this could be the problem.

However with a slow process..

Only 2 factors..

1) Your machine has a virus 2) Hardware problems (Harddisk, Video Card, Motherboard, Memory, etc).

For virus, i suggest that you do an online virus/spyware scan. http://housecall.trendmicro.com/

Or any free antivirus online scan (try searching google for the link on mcaffee, etc).

If its hardware, best bet is to bring it to a shop for diagnostics. Or if you are a techy, diagnose it one by one.

Also try simple things like defragging your harddrive etc,

if none of this works then im afraid you are going to have to format your computer

Answer 4

Soluto is a good piece of software. It analyzes the amount of time each program takes during startup so that you can pare down to only the necessities.

Answer 5

Try Soluto. It should show you how long each stage takes. The beta version is the only one that has a desktop app. The normal one just opens a web page.