Slow start up

[familychoice]

My newish PC seems to be acting 'a bit weird' recently. Occasionally it takes an age to start up, with everything happening in slow motion (login screen etc) and then when it finishes booting up I get messages warning me of 'low resources' and 'performance issues'. I can't remember what these said exactly and I accidentally clicked the 'don't show these messages again' button (yeah, I know).

The motherboard was replaced a few months back, part of the Dell recall issue, but the engineer said I had a 'blisteringly powerful machine'. Doesn't feel like it some days.

What could be causing the slow boot up? Could this be a hardware or OS problem? Could it be the dreaded McAfee messing things up as usual?

I guess the first thing is to switch that off but the slow start up only happens about 25% of the time.

It's still under warranty, and I need to contact them as the characters are all rubbing off the keyboard that came with it, but if I can rule out anything obvious it'll help before contacting another dreaded support centre.

[robwhizz]

What are your specs? Sounds like it could be something eating RAM and forcing lots of virtual ram usage.

Interesting that it's not all the time though.

Check your RAM by going into the task manager, performance tab. Check the readings for physical memory and look at the pagefile usage and history.

Reboot a few times and see if any of this changes. Perhaps it's a dodgy module or incorrectly seated.

[familychoice]

Thanks for the reply Rob, I just booted up again and it was quicker this time. The specs are:

Intel® Core™ i7-2600 Processor (3.40GHz, 8MB)   
Windows® 7 Home Premium, 64bit
8192MB Dual Channel DDR3 1333MHz [4x2048] Memory   
1.5TB (7,200rpm) Serial ATA Hard Drive   
1GB ATI® Radeon™ HD 5770 graphics card   

The current readings are:

Physical memory
Total 8174
Cached 2495
Available 6425
Free 4361

Kernel memory
Paged 185
Non-paged 86

At the moment I've only got Task Manager and Firefox open, though no doubt McAfee is eating up a fair chunk. The figures above have also changed as I'm typing this.

[Mr Anderson]

What programs do you have opening on start up? Are they all necessary at that time? Do any try to connect to update servers while you're still logging in? Any (McAfee for instance) trying to run a scan on start up? Have you done a recent full virus scan with decent AV software?

[familychoice]

What programs do you have opening on start up? Are they all necessary at that time? Do any try to connect to update servers while you're still logging in? Any (McAfee for instance) trying to run a scan on start up? Have you done a recent full virus scan with decent AV software?

There isn't much opening on start-up, though drop-box and OpenOffice could be switched off maybe. I think Dell has quite a few things running in the background: their 'action centre' for example. Win 7 is set up to update automatically, though it usually tells me when it's updating.

I ran a full scan about a week ago (using McAfee though) and it came out clean. What would you recommend - is there something I could download free and run a scan with easily? I'm using AVG on my other machines, and I seem to remember there's a real faff required if McAfee's already on your machine.

[Dom]

Yeah it's best not to have more than once AV program on your machine because they tend not to play nice with each other.

My first guess would be all the crap that Dell no doubt puts on your machine. That's the worst thing about buying pre-built laptops/PCs in my opinion - they come with too many programs installed. More programs installed means less hard drive space, more registry entries, and more hidden things on start-up, all of which can slow a machine down (although usually it's pretty consistent, i.e. a slow machine is a slow machine, not just a slow machine 25% of the time).

Other than that, do you regularly defrag your hard drives? I've found that a good defrag once a week (and a virus scan as well) work wonders long term. Also, have you installed/updated any drivers or new programs recently? Sometimes they can mess things up a bit if there's a bug with them.

If not, it might be something hardware related... possibly to do with your network. I've found that my Windows 7 machine has, in the past, almost frozen on start-up if (for whatever reason) it can't connect to the network. It's like it stops everything while it tries to connect, and then retries... and retries... and does that a few times before giving up and moving on. The cause of that slowness was more to do with dodgy cabling or my router than my PC though. It might explain the slowness only happening on occasion, rather than all the time, though.

Your specs look good - I can't imagine why you'd have problems with it starting up unless something was awry. I've not got McAfee installed on my home machine so I can't really say if/how that plays up (but AV software is usually a cause for slowness... I'm looking at YOU, Norton Antivirus) but my machine is roughly the same as yours and it flies.

If you don't have any luck with McAfee, I'd try Microsoft Security Essentials. It's free, it works, and it doesn't hog your system.

[familychoice]

Other than that, do you regularly defrag your hard drives? I've found that a good defrag once a week (and a virus scan as well) work wonders long term. Also, have you installed/updated any drivers or new programs recently? Sometimes they can mess things up a bit if there's a bug with them.

Nothing recently, but I've got the Windows updater on auto, though it's weird that it's not consistently slow in starting up. I haven't defragged for a while so that's definitely something I need to run.

If not, it might be something hardware related... possibly to do with your network.

I'm not on a network, there's an external drive connected but that's switched off apart from when I'm backing up.

If you don't have any luck with McAfee, I'd try Microsoft Security Essentials. It's free, it works, and it doesn't hog your system.

I didn't realise that was free, thanks, I'll have a look at that.

[robwhizz]

Once it's booted, does it regain full speed? If not (or if it takes a long time), fire up the taskmanager/performance and go into the resource monitor. Look at CPU and reorder by CPU activity to see if you can catch any processes that are hogging CPU time.

I'd get rid of all the crappy Dell apps like 'Action Centre'. They tend to just waste resources for no reason.

Memory specs look fine. There's nothing eating RAM on boot (and with 8GB I can't imagine any program being able to use enough to slow you down), even if you have a temperamental RAM module, 4GB would be plenty on boot anyway.

It looks like a program (most likely the AV) is doing something on startup that is monopolising the CPU and/or disk. Do a defrag and remove the AV see if it improves.

Also, download 'Hijack This', boot into safe mode and do a scan with log. Post up the log. That'll show what's loading on startup and if there are any nasties lurking.

[familychoice]

Thank Rob (and for all the other suggestions), I'll try all that out and see if it stops the problem. 

[Matt]

Also try going start > run > typing msconfig

Then click on the start up tab, and deselect anything you dont want starting with the PC, i normally only leave AV.

You can also go to the services tab and deselect some items there, but only if you know what your doing.

[familychoice]

Also try going start > run > typing msconfig

Then click on the start up tab, and deselect anything you dont want starting with the PC, i normally only leave AV.

You can also go to the services tab and deselect some items there, but only if you know what your doing.

thanks matt, I deselected a few things a while back, didn't make much difference though switching off mcaffee speeded Photoshop up a bit.

Haven't tried the method you've mentioned so I'll check that out too.

[Jem]

Agree with Dom - get rid of crappy mcaffee and download Microsoft Security Essentials. You probably think "Microsoft? Security? Hahahaha" but it was rated better than a bunch of other AVs (inc. AVG, Avast etc) in independent benchmarks/trials.

[familychoice]

Cheers, I'll try it out on the laptop that's running AVG.

No idea why the iPhone tried to change running to runny just then, but I'm thankful to it for giving me some acess...