Toshiba Becoming Very Slow on Start-Up

Shane732

I'm hoping some of you might be able to help me out.

My Toshiba Satellite i5 2.53Ghz, 4GB RAM is becoming very slow on start up.

I've run anti virus checks on it and it's coming up clean. Over 50% of the hard drive is free - I can up this to 75% free pretty easily.

It's taking the computer between 5 - 10 mins to become usable whereas it used to do it about a minute! The computer is just over a year old.

Is there anything I can do to speed the start up process up?

Your comments would be much appreciated.

sellerbarry

Hi. Probably too many programs ticked to start in your startup menu. Click start in the bottom left of your screen then type msconfig in the search box. click on the startup tab that opens and uncheck any box that you don't need to start when you turn on your pc. The less you have checked, the quicker it will boot for you. Thx. Good luck

Black Swan

It's a bit difficult to solve your situation remotely without access to your rig, so these are a few guesses that may help:

Using Windows 7 OS (from Administrator account):

• start>control panel>system and security>administrative tools>free up disk space
• start>control panel>system and security>administrative tools>free up disk space>clean up system files
• start>control panel>system and security>administrative tools>defragment your hard drive

Are you keeping your Windows 7 updated with fixes and patches? Many of my friends just leave auto update on for this, although my gamer friends prefer to do this manually.

There are several freeware disk cleaning programmes (Ccleaner, etc.) that can be used to remove deleted files, cookies, etc., that have been piling up over time and slowing your rig that are missed by Microsoft utilities. They can also be used to evaluate and clean out registry errors.

Some security suite programmes have tools to evaluate your operating system for efficiency and system errors. The one I use does this. If you have a security suite installed, read the user manual to see if they have this feature.

GreenWolfe

sellerbarry wrote: »

Hi. Probably too many programs ticked to start in your startup menu. Click start in the bottom left of your screen then type msconfig in the search box. click on the startup tab that opens and uncheck any box that you don't need to start when you turn on your pc. The less you have checked, the quicker it will boot for you. Thx. Good luck

Autoruns is really handy for this.

Shane732

Will run a defragment tonight and see how it runs after it.

Anything on the lists above that jumps out as not needing to be there?

Also - I suppose upgrading to 8GB wouldn't do any harm either. Crucial ram I suppose?

Skerries

god! your pc must take ages to start

apart from anything by Msoft and McAfee I would get rid of most of it, and McAfee altogether if you can as well
especially Adobe stuff and i'd say a lot of the Toshiba rubbish

4gb's is fine for that machine and isn't going to help too much with starting up all that

Shane732

Skerries wrote: »

god! your pc must take ages to start

apart from anything by Msoft and McAfee I would get rid of most of it, and McAfee altogether if you can as well
especially Adobe stuff and i'd say a lot of the Toshiba rubbish

4gb's is fine for that machine and isn't going to help too much with starting up all that

People really seems to hate some of the anti virus companies, don't they?! I used to use Norton and used to get awful stick about how crap it was. Now I use MCAfee and get the same thing!

You can buy 8 GB's of Crucial RAM off their website for less than €50 so I might as well give it a go. Putting 8GB in isn't going to have a negative effect is it?

Right I'll un-tick everything apart from MS and McAfee - I presume I should leave Java ticked as well?

Cheers.

gouche

I'd just get rid of McAfee altogether. Install Microsoft Security Essentials - free, less bloated and is actually a decent Microsoft product.
If you just disable the start-up items it'll still be there and might leave you unprotected.

As Skerries said, 4Gb is more than enough for that machine so I wouldn't bother with more ram unless your doing heavy graphic work or similar.

Overheal

AVcomparitives.org is your friend. McAfee ranks very low, while Kaspersky, ranked #1 taking full makrs in all categories. MSE is in the middle of the pack. Advantage of paid AV is still in the internet security packages: if you're just buying it for antivirus it kind of seems like a waste.