How to diagnose slow Vista 64 bootup

R

RedShark

[H]ard|Gawd
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Aug 8, 2003
Messages
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Hello,

What I'm looking for is a tool like XP's BootVis that works with Vista.

Shortly after the "Welcome" screen appears, the screen goes blank, I have nothing but a mouse cursor, and the hard disk activity stops. It sits there for a while, and eventually continues booting normally. Total boot time is ~4 minutes, which for the machine in my signature is a bit ridiculous.

I know that reformatting would fix it but I don't want to go there until Win 7 is out :)

I've tried disabling all programs that run on startup/login using the SysInternals (now Microsoft) Autoruns utility. I believe my slow boot issue is a configuration problem and not related to what's loading at startup. I'm thinking a network issue is a possibility, but my wireless card is using a static IP, and my wired card is disabled.

Any ideas? Thanks :)
 
Create a new user account and log into that user and see if it does the same thing.
 
That's a good idea, I've created the new account and setup Vista to log into it automatically. Since I'm about to go to bed, I'll test it tomorrow morning. I'll post back with the results then.

Thanks for the tip.
 
Thank you both for your replies. Unfortunately, creating and using a second user account did not correct the problem. The symptoms were identical, even though most programs didn't load automatically. I'll look at the link posted by MrF in more detail soon, though those tools look a bit complex. I was hoping to avoid turning this into a science project but I'll figure it out if necessary :) MrF - have you used those tools at all?

Does anyone have any other suggestions?
 
No, I have not used these tools. But, I plan to give it a try.
This claims it is better than bootvis.
 
MrF - Thanks for the additional link. It sounds like this tool is just what I need.

Mister Natural - Yeah, I check those pretty often, but the only errors are all benign. There are only a few besides--everything else is normal. E.g. no bad disk sectors or anything like that.

I'll almost certainly check into the Microsoft tool and see how it fairs, but I likely won't right away as I've got a lot to do and it doesn't look particularly trivial :)
 
The laptop I bought almost 2 years ago used to do this same exact thing (Vista x86, fresh install, since I didn't want to hassle with all the bloatware on laptops). I'd type in my password to log in but then be greeted by a black screen and a mouse in the center for about a minute or two before the desktop showed up.

Then one day out of the blue it stopped doing that. But before it fixed itself I got around it my putting the laptop to sleep most of the time, since I didn't want to hassle with that lagged up startup during class and whatnot.
 
Thanks again Mr. F for the information on those tools. I spent some time this evening working on this, and have found several more threads/posts of interest:

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=117154
http://alinconstantin.blogspot.com/2008/06/speeding-up-windows-vista-boot-and.html
http://www.vistax64.com/general-discussion/219681-slow-boot-up-time-2.html

The first is probably the most informative.

First, I used the tracing facility, and was quickly able to identify a network problem. "bowser.sys" (not a typo) and the server/workstation services were taking an inordinate amount of time to startup. A quick google suggested this could be the result of a driver issue. A slightly newer version of the wireless driver I need had since been released, so I upgraded that, and cut my boot time by about a minute.

Then, I used the "prepsystem" feature to cut it by about another 30 seconds or so.

All-in-all, this tool certainly works. The hard drive is basically maxed out throughout the boot process, but that's also because I have a ton of crap loading on startup that I want, so I'm happy with this result.

Thanks again everyone for helping get this issue resolved. I should be able to hold out until Windows 7 now :)
 
As per my original post:

mattsaccount said:
I'm thinking a network issue is a possibility, ...
Click to expand...

:)

I think updating the network driver just to correct a "slow boot" is really grasping at straws though--using this utility made it much easier to isolate the source of the problem.
 
mattsaccount said:
As per my original post:



:)

I think updating the network driver just to correct a "slow boot" is really grasping at straws though--using this utility made it much easier to isolate the source of the problem.
Click to expand...

True... but almost all the machines I have ever saw that seemed to 'hang' at bootup had network issues...
 
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