PC Labouring on startup

Trotter

Just looking for opinions here..

New Dell PC.. 4 weeks old. Ive used MS Antispy to chop down the list of startup files to the minimum I need.. but.. in the last couple of days (after I installed and uninstalled yahoo widgets).. something is causing the PC to go into eggtimer for about 2 minutes before it sorts itself out.

During the 2 mins or so, I can access files on my desktop but nothing in my taskbar where all of my shortcuts are.

Theres no difference now to the list of programs that used to kick off fine up to a few days ago.

Any ideas?

KdjaCL

Go to Start run and type "msconfig" in the Startup tab see whats loading, technically you dont need anything but anti virus etc: may be useful to have at startup.

Google the names of stuff you dont know and kill them.


One way to do it is kill everything if pc doesnt start up recheck them one by one to find out whats needed


Would go with google if your unsure.


kdjac

V1llianous

You might have some adware stuck on there so download AdAware from www.lavasoft.de and run that delete anything that is found.

You can also see what is starting on startup by running Start -> Run -> MSCONFIG & enter. Look on the startup tab to see what you can take out, if you aren't sure google the file names.

Trotter

Yeah I've done all that.. Im running AVG, MS Antispy, Adaware, ZoneAlarm, Spybot, and then Firefox & Thunderbird.

I'll go through the list again and see what I can spot.
I'd love to see what its working on as soon as the eggtimer comes up..

KdjaCL

Trotter wrote:

I'd love to see what its working on as soon as the eggtimer comes up..

Press CTRL Alt Del and in processes sort by Memory or CPU consumption


kdjac

riptide

Trotter wrote:

Yeah I've done all that.. Im running AVG, MS Antispy, Adaware, ZoneAlarm, Spybot, and then Firefox & Thunderbird.

I'll go through the list again and see what I can spot.
I'd love to see what its working on as soon as the eggtimer comes up..

You know Spypbot and Adware/Adwatch soak up 100% processor for about 30-40 seconds at startup. Whats the spec on you machine - CPU spec that is.

V1llianous

I wouldn't run AdAware, Spybot and MS Anti-Spyware. I'd remove Spybot and Adaware, then ensure I had MS Defender ( latest beta ) running. They are all scanning at the same time which could be causing it.

Run a diskcleanup on your system drive and see what you can clear.

If you have more than one physical hard drive move your diskpage file to the non-system disk.

kmick

My etrust antivirus takes about the same time to start up. Just get used to it.

8T8

One other useful program for nailing spyware loading at startup is Hijack This though be careful with it as it lists all things loading at startup (good & bad).

Try disabling any redundant network cards in the system if they are not being used just right click and select disable in the network control panel.

One other program is Microsoft's bootvis tool install it and run the trace so it can optimize the systems boot procedure though it results do vary so there is no guarantee of any gain to be made.

Some instructions on using the tool can be found here.

conzy

Try this:

Try this:

1.Uninstall photoshop
2.Delete all folders it leaves behind
3.Download Crap Cleaner here:http://www.filehippo.com/download_ccleaner/
4.Run crap cleaner, it will remove several hundred megabytes of crap
5.Click on issues, run the cleaner it will fix minor registery problems.
6.Download regseeker here:http://www.hoverdesk.net/dl/en/RegSeeker.zip
7.save it to your HDD and run it, It will find lots of problems with the registery, unused file extensions and bits of photoshop, some problems will be "red" some will be "green" select them all and delete them. dont worry about breaking something as regseeker and Crap cleaner make backups of the registery so that you can restore it easily.
8.Download NTREGOPT here: http://www.derfisch.de/lars/ntregopt-setup.exe
9. Its short for NT registery optimizer.
10. Run it, it will strip down your registery and rebuild it, and will tell you by how much it shrunk the registery.
11.Reboot and your PC will be as clean as a whistle, and run much smoother.
12.Now that photoshop is completely removed, try a re-install.

If it doesnt work after all that,

Good Luck

Except ignore the reference to photoshop, I made this earlier so its just a copy and paste Job

Also, download process explorer http://www.sysinternals.com/Files/ProcessExplorerNt.zip
and run it to see what process are running under svchost.exe

Also, run the task manager at startup to see what program is hogging the CPU

Fabritzo

The installer for CCleaner has the option to install yahoo toolbar :rolleyes:

conzy

I know LOL, but you can choose to not install it. they have to fund the development of it somehow, anyway its a brilliant program and if you run it weekly it will stop the build up of ****e

Trotter

Thanks very much for all the tips.. Ive just spent an hour going through them all! Its still delaying on something though so I give up lol

Ya could eat your dinner off the registry at this stage!! Its spotless. The startup files are all stuff I recognise too.

Just to answer a couple of questions.. its a Pentium 4 3GHz with 2Gb RAM.

Also, the System Idle Process is the one thats taking up 80 - 90% of the CPU time on bootup. Im not sure if thats significant or not.

conzy

Thats normal, I dont know whats wrong with it

Everything seems correct, could you list what is starting at startup?

And also how many processes are running once it boots fully and the egg timer goes away.

Trotter

http://img202.imageshack.us/img202/1780/applications7ko.jpg
http://img213.imageshack.us/img213/9089/startup0qp.jpg

Here's my applications after the egg timer is gone... and the startup files!

conzy

Jusched isnt needed, either is hkcmd,

Just google all the services that are running, if you dont use them, kill it with services.msc or use regseekr to delete it's startup entry.

It will take a while but it will be worth it.

P.s type "msconfig" in Run and go to the startup tab and take a screenshot of that.

Trotter

Here ya go.. theres an overlap in the two screen shots.

http://img226.imageshack.us/my.php?image=startup15in.jpg
http://img203.imageshack.us/my.php?image=startup23th.jpg

8T8

Well ones you can untick for sure and are not vital are
Adobe update manager
Adobe reader speed (if you dont mind Acrobat reader loading slower)
InteMEM (just check your modem still works after this)
Trillian (unless you use this a lot)

I would not untick hkcmd, igfxtray or igfxpers these are required if you want to alter the settings of your sound and graphics hardware anyway their loading at startup makes little difference.

ehtray is part of the MCE interface so it is possible to disable that if you want but you will loose some of the MCE functionality.

Do try Bootvis and defrag your hard drive as well.

ai ing

try disabling Trillian, I use it as well and it can take absolutely ages to start up. I use a little freeware app Startup Delayer (http://www.r2.com.au/software.php?page=2&show=startdelay) to delay Trillian loading for 50 seconds and it works great.

hobie

I have a P4 Dell .... from 'power up' to 'Ready to use' takes a little over 2 minutes ..... never found it a problem .... :rolleyes:

switch on and go and get a cup of coffee ..... the time will fly !!!! ....

Trotter

It turned out to be a corruption in XP itself. SO.. Ive reinstalled the whole lot and Im back in nippy business again.

Im gonna take all the tips you've given me though and make sure it stays in good shape!!
Thanks a lot for all the help!

ai ing wrote:

try disabling Trillian, I use it as well and it can take absolutely ages to start up. I use a little freeware app Startup Delayer (http://www.r2.com.au/software.php?page=2&show=startdelay) to delay Trillian loading for 50 seconds and it works great.

So I set the delayer to kick off on startup and then delay some other startup programs like thunderbird and trillian etc? Sounds cool!

riptide

Trotter wrote:

So I set the delayer to kick off on startup and then delay some other startup programs like thunderbird and trillian etc? Sounds cool!

Recommended! The people at Microsoft have this insane drive of trying to get everyting to start at once on startup. Can cause problems... especially sometimes tray items don't appear... putting items on hold for a few seconds gives other things time to load... You may even find that the whole system as a whole loads faster cos the efficiency is increased when it has fewer things to work on at any given time. Hard drive seek times really add up here.

Trotter

Do I need both MS Antispy and MS Defender? If not, which one is best?

8T8

MS Defender = MS anti-spyware they renamed it and gave it an updated interface.