Vista slow boot

BopNiblets

Just wondering what to check could be causing a slow boot in Vista (Home Premium).
Recently, it spends about 30 seconds on the Welcome screen, then 30 more on the default desktop colour before the jpeg wallpaper appears and the taskbar and icons, then it's another minute before I can actually start using anything.

I think before I set up a wireless network (bridged wifi card and adsl router) it was roughly the same as XPs boot time, about 1 min to desktop, and it's just taking ages now.

I have only the barebones startup processes and services and I've scanned for spyware with Spybot S&D and viruses with AVG Free but nothing came up.
I tried to get Spywareblaster on but it never runs even though it's supposed to on Vista, never bothered with AdAware because it never finds anything (or never used to on XP ).

Any ideas?

projectmayhem

shot in the dark but when i got my external HDD vista's boot time slowed down (naturally), i wonder if it's connecting to the router and scanning for things on the network before letting you at the desktop

BopNiblets

I did look at task manager once when it was on the blank colour just after the Welcome screen and there was one of the svhost.exe services chewing on the CPU

Would Network Discovery in Network and Sharing Center be slowing it down?
And could I safely turn it off without dropping the wireless connection that my brother uses for his laptop?

ethernet

Getting an IP address can slow things down slightly but usually can be neglected for the time it takes.

Run 'msconfig'. If you didn't put 'Run' in the start menu, open up the Command Prompt and type 'msconfig' [without the quotations marks].

Bring up the Startup tab. Untick anything that isn't needed -- crap from Adobe Reader, RealPlayer, Nokia, etc. If you're unsure what any entry under that list does, Google it first. You don't want to disable anything important.

Spybot Search and Destroy [in advanced mode] can help you out here. It can even tell you what the startup entry does and whether it's necessary during boot-up.

@projectmayhem
When I was running a release candidate of Vista, it always did a quick file system check when I was booting up. Having to spin up the drive and do a check may be adding to your boot time.

@BopNiblets
How much RAM and what processor do you have? Don't use Vista with less than 1 GB of dedicated RAM. For a good experience, use 2 GB. Do you have Aero enabled [the fance graphics]?

BopNiblets

Yeah I know all about startup items (I only have 2) and I will be building a new system later this year, my sig says I'm using 1gig and it's still accurate.

Vista itself runs fine with Aero & transparency, it's the boot that is slow.

8T8

How fast is the hard drive in the system ?

Something doesn't sound right though if it takes over a minute you could try checking the event viewer and see if anything is flagged ?

I've seen a handful of systems, my laptop included, which pretty much hang for about 45 seconds after the desktop icons load. I even came across a brand new machine that did it. The new machine had 4GB of RAM!

EDIT: I see you mentioned the problems probably started around the time you bridged your LAN connections. The problem could be caused by one or more network interfaces trying to obtain an IP address and failing. If any of them cannot use DHCP then try assigning a static IP to them. That should improve things a lot... XP hangs in the same way if it can't get an IP automatically when set to do so.

BopNiblets

8T8: I put it on a partition on my 74 gig Raptor.

Didn't think of the event log, cheers.

Whoa! 6810 Events, all of varying kinds, warnings and Errors, not sure what I'm looking for here...

DHCP, TCIP? Service Control Manager Eventlog Provider?

Here are the most frequent DHCP ones:

Your computer was not able to renew its address from the network (from the DHCP Server) for the Network Card with network address 001109220DDD. The following error occurred:
The operation was cancelled by the user.. Your computer will continue to try and obtain an address on its own from the network address (DHCP) server.

The IP address lease 192.168.1.** for the Network Card with network address 021109610323 has been denied by the DHCP server 192.168.1.1 (The DHCP Server sent a DHCPNACK message).

The description for Event ID 1003 from source Microsoft-Windows-Dhcp-Client cannot be found. Either the component that raises this event is not installed on your local computer or the installation is corrupted. You can install or repair the component on the local computer.

If the event originated on another computer, the display information had to be saved with the event.

The following information was included with the event:

001109610323
%%2163146757

The description string for parameter reference (%1) could not be found

There's a LOT (4810!) of these errors too:

The Remote Access Connection Manager service depends on the Telephony service which failed to start because of the following error:
The service cannot be started, either because it is disabled or because it has no enabled devices associated with it.

And a few of these:

TCP/IP has reached the security limit imposed on the number of concurrent TCP connect attempts.

I've also noticed it's pretty sluggish to shutdown too, even though I tweaked the registry entry to close programs sooner.
Thanks guys.

8T8

Try setting a manual IP for your computer and not rely on the DHCP server.

Go into control panel\network & sharing center\manage network connections inside there you will find the properties for the network connection go into the properties of the TCP/IP v4 connection and make the following changes.

Example for Eircom ADSL broadband;

IP Address: 192.168.1.3
Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0
Gateway: 192.168.1.1 (this is the IP of your router so could be different e.g 192.168.1.254 is sometimes set on models. If you don't know the IP in the network & sharing center click view status then on details and it will list the IP of the gateway)

Primary DNS: 213.94.190.194
Secondary DNS: 213.94.190.236

(other internet providers will have a different DNS so you'd have to look that up on their site)

Other things to try related to the network aspect if that is the course of the delay would be that you could try updating the firmware of the router or a reset along with updating the network card driver in Vista.

Mac daddy

My system at home was having the same problems at the start solved mine by configuring a static ip adress on the nic, that way its not getting stuck when trying to contact a dhcp server.

BopNiblets

I don't suppose disabling the DHCP Client Service would produce the same result?

What's NIC again?

I have a network bridge connection too that has the LAN ADSL and the WiFi, so which one would I do the static IP for?

8T8

I don't suppose disabling the DHCP Client Service would produce the same result?

Nope.

If you do what I outlined above then that will set the fixed IP, you can leave the DHCP server running on your router for any other devices on the network so they do not have to be set fixed IP's.

NIC = Network Interface Card shorthand for your network card which these days is built into the motherboard.

You don't have to reconfigure anything in the router that handles the ADSL/WiFi you only need to set the fixed IP in Windows thats all.

ethernet

Karsini wrote:

I've seen a handful of systems, my laptop included, which pretty much hang for about 45 seconds after the desktop icons load. I even came across a brand new machine that did it. The new machine had 4GB of RAM! ...

Sounds like a nasty RAM overflow. Wouldn't be the first time ...