Slow Booting

[Jim]

+1

The OP has a software problem that needs to be addressed. If the OP
has done CHKDSK, looked at the device manager etc. and all is well
then he doesn't need a new drive, he just needs to isolate the
problem. Perhaps as has been suggested he should just reinstall the
system or install a backup that he 'should' have made when all was
good. Of course if he switched to a SSD then his problems would be
gone because he would install a new system on the SSD, if he cloned
his system and put it on the SSD then there is a very good chance that
his problem would still exist. The speed of the hard drive during
startup is not the problem. SSD's are faster but on a normal system we
are only talking 30 seconds or so not the 5 minutes that the OP says
it takes to boot. Nope, there is definitely some software problem.
Maybe a hardware problem but I doubt it. The OP says that he has had
his system for 3 years and now it is slow to boot. Why am I not
suprised? I would guess that many things have been installed and
uninstalled in that period of time and probably some of it is still
left behind as junk. The system needs to be cleaned thorougly.
Manually clean the registry. Get rid of all traces of old programs and
any other programs that are not needed. Check the event viewer for
problems. Scan for malware. Do a selective startup using msconfig.
Disable all non microsoft startup items and see if the computer is
faster to boot. etc., etc. All the common steps to fix a slow computer
have already been suggested.

There is no magic program that will fix everything, but there are
common steps that a person takes to narrow down the problem and
eliminate it. SSD's are nice but not the solution to the problem the
OP has.

Jim

 

[Twayne]

In

Yes, if someone insists on using a registry cleaner
(*any* registry cleaner), it's always wise to do that.

*However*, if the registry cleaner screws things up badly
enough, the system may be unbootable, so it's not great
to rely on that.

It's ALWAYS a good idea to back up before doing ANYTHNG to the OS, files or
otherwise.

In all of my many years of sercicing machines, I have NEVER had ANY cleaner
mess up ANYTHING on ANY machine and also have never heard of anyone with
such an experience.
Your closed-mindedness to some very useful tools is an absolute cartoon
many times; your posts should always be ignored as they're nothing but
opportunities for you to lie about cleaners. All you need to say is to not
use a no-name product with no reputation, as with anything you download from
the net, not just cleaners.

You're a real dummy.

 

[Twayne]

In

"Ken Blake" wrote in message



Excellent point.
Registry cleaners can cause more problems than they do
good. A good backup and/or the procedure to boot up when a
normal boot doesn't work, is extremely valuable,
Buffalo

Citations for you reg cleaner claims? Where can your words be validated
with fact?

Also it has nothing to do with bootless machines; I've never come across any
such thing. Where are your citations?

 

[Twayne]

In

Why download from a third party site like ninite.com?
SUPERAntispyware Free can be downloaded from

<http://www.superantispyware.com/downloadfile.html?productid=SUPERANTISPYWAREFREE>

and Malwarebytes Anti-Malware can be downloaded here:

<http://downloads.malwarebytes.org/mbam-download.php>

Sounds to me like a 1-stop instead of a 2-stop.

 

[Paul]

In

Citations for you reg cleaner claims? Where can your words be validated
with fact?

Example of such. Search time, two minutes, via Google Groups.

http://groups.google.com/group/micr...al/msg/ee01e588408fba40?hl=en-GB&dmode=source

It's a tool for usage by experts, not for totally automated,
one button registry decimation.

Paul

 

[AlDrake]

You really go out of your way to justify your point of view. There is a
HUGE difference between a business decision (Jimmy L) and somebody
trying to understand and fix their computer. And you say that because
somebody wants to understand the problem they have no life??? Now that
is really SAD.

No.You are one that should be sad. I simply stated I had a humble
opinion. Something that you and others have no respect for and continue
to respond to. Pot kettle?

 

[Mellowed]

The OP has a software problem that needs to be addressed. If the OP
has done CHKDSK, looked at the device manager etc. and all is well
then he doesn't need a new drive, he just needs to isolate the
problem. Perhaps as has been suggested he should just reinstall the
system or install a backup that he 'should' have made when all was
good. Of course if he switched to a SSD then his problems would be
gone because he would install a new system on the SSD, if he cloned
his system and put it on the SSD then there is a very good chance that
his problem would still exist. The speed of the hard drive during
startup is not the problem. SSD's are faster but on a normal system we
are only talking 30 seconds or so not the 5 minutes that the OP says
it takes to boot. Nope, there is definitely some software problem.
Maybe a hardware problem but I doubt it. The OP says that he has had
his system for 3 years and now it is slow to boot. Why am I not
suprised? I would guess that many things have been installed and
uninstalled in that period of time and probably some of it is still
left behind as junk. The system needs to be cleaned thorougly.
Manually clean the registry. Get rid of all traces of old programs and
any other programs that are not needed. Check the event viewer for
problems. Scan for malware. Do a selective startup using msconfig.
Disable all non microsoft startup items and see if the computer is
faster to boot. etc., etc. All the common steps to fix a slow computer
have already been suggested.

There is no magic program that will fix everything, but there are
common steps that a person takes to narrow down the problem and
eliminate it. SSD's are nice but not the solution to the problem the
OP has.

Jim

Right on Jim!

 

[Roy Smith]

Have you looked at Ninite.com? The site has many useful free
installers for the most common things you need. You can pick several
programs and you get one installer that installs them all onto your
computer consecutively with no spyware, no Ask toolbars etc. Great
site if you need to install several items fast or even just to get an
installer for one program. The nice part is that you just click
install, no boxes to check or uncheck, no toolbars, just a smooth
installation of your programs and you can find most of them on ONE
site, Ninite.com

When I redo a system I go to Ninite and download one installer that
might put 10 or more programs on my computer. Just one click and the
install is all done in a short time with no interaction on your part.
You should check it out, it really saves a lot of time. You will find
everything from browsers, messaging apps, Itunes. quicktime, Java,
Flash, .net, Shockwave, imaging programs like Infranview, Gimp,
Picassa, Document readers like Foxit, Libreoffice, Adobe Reader.
Security programs like Malwarebytes, Superantispyware and so many more
programs all in ONE place and super easy to install. No need to hunt
all over the net, most of the common free programs are there.

So to answer your question: That's why I use Ninite.com.

You forgot to mention that you can keep the installer and run it
again in a periodical basis. When you do that ninites installer
will install the latest version of whatever and skip the
rest.

 

[s|b]

Right on Jim!

Get a room...

 

[Yousuf Khan]

That depends on how much time you have. Many times if you let your
system get to a point where it have been getting slower over time it can
be quicker to reinstall. If it just happened chances are you can find
the one cause of it and remove it.

I'm not retired and work 60 hrs a week. I can't afford to play.

I'm not retired either, and I look upon it as I can't afford to spend
several hours re-installing the OS, all of the applications, and all of
the patches, and then spend time reconfiguring them to the way they were
before.

For me it's easier to look through the event log and check online to see
how to fix each of the problems. After awhile, you get good at picking
which event entries might be related to the one you're attempting to
solve, & which ones are just unrelated side issues.

Yousuf Khan

 

[Ken Blake]

I'm not retired either, and I look upon it as I can't afford to spend
several hours re-installing the OS, all of the applications, and all of
the patches, and then spend time reconfiguring them to the way they were
before.

For me it's easier to look through the event log and check online to see
how to fix each of the problems. After awhile, you get good at picking
which event entries might be related to the one you're attempting to
solve, & which ones are just unrelated side issues.

I *am* retired, but other than that, we are almost exactly alike in
this regard.

 

[charlie]

I *am* retired, but other than that, we are almost exactly alike in
this regard.

One of my least favorite things is to reinstall windows. (Retired or
not!) I'd rather just replace the whole P/C, since the effort is about
the same.

I never remember all the patches and make happy configuration details.

Finding all the application disks and keys can be a pain.

Some of the apps don't want to install unless the windows version is at
the revision level they were intended for. This seems to really be a
pain when windows was updated to a new version over the old one.

Some apps will not install, because the software OEM has dropped web
based support for "call home". And, the patches for the version are no
longer available. A very limited number of apps will not install unless
you totally wipe the disk with something other than the usual utilities.
(They "hid stuff" somewhere in an unusual place on the HD.)


Currently my home server is kaput, and that causes a further
backup/restore problem.

 

[Ken Blake]

One of my least favorite things is to reinstall windows. (Retired or
not!)

Same here.

I'd rather just replace the whole P/C, since the effort is about
the same.

Yes, but the cost is *much* higher.

I never remember all the patches and make happy configuration details.

Yes!

Finding all the application disks and keys can be a pain.

Yes!

 

[Yousuf Khan]

The above is the reason I make several backups as I install the
system. When everything is good I make a final backup and update it as
needed. You probably do the same. I can restore the system in less
than 20 minutes. My preference is always to try to fix the problem but
on those rare occassions when the repair is beyond my abilities it
sure is nice to have that backup.

I ran into a nasty bug during the Windows 7 SP1 rollout where the SP1
bundle goes into an endless reboot and lockup loop. Fortunately, for me,
I had made an image backup prior to the SP1 installation, so it was
fairly easy to go back. Albeit, even an image restore took at least a
couple of hours, because I kept a fairly large C: drive back in those
days, with both data and applications mixed into that drive. After that
I decided to keep the C: drive partitioned fairly small, and keep all
major data off of it.

It turned out the bug was caused by having too many language packs on
the Windows 7 installation. Microsoft didn't find a full solution for it
until nearly a year after the SP1 was originally released. Too late for
me, I had to find my own solution before that, and I discovered if I
uninstalled most language packs before applying the SP1, the patch worked.

Yousuf Khan

 

[Yousuf Khan]

Adobe ReaderOn Sat, 20 Apr 2013 07:55:40 -0400, Stan Brown



Neither will CCleaner, unless you choose to use that function of it.

CCleaner does many more things than Cleanmgr does. I personally think
that it's an excellent program as long as you don't use its registry
cleaning functionality.

The registry cleaner portion has its uses too. Just like with its file
cleaner portion, you can't just have it willy-nilly delete everything it
feels like deleting without you paying close attention to what it will
delete (irrecoverably). For example, the file cleaner will happily
delete Windows log files, and Windows crash dumps. But you may want to
save some of those at various times, so you should be aware of what
you're always doing with CCleaner, whether you're messing with files or
messing with the registry.

Yousuf Khan

 

[Buffalo]

"Twayne" wrote in message news:[email protected]...

In

Citations for you reg cleaner claims? Where can your words be validated
with fact?

Also it has nothing to do with bootless machines; I've never come across
any such thing. Where are your citations?

Screw your citations; you sound like a teenager with too much time.
I am speaking of personal experience with using Registry cleaners.
Google could be your friend, instead of porn sites.

Twayne stated:
"In all of my many years of sercicing machines, I have NEVER had ANY cleaner
mess up ANYTHING on ANY machine and also have never heard of anyone with
such an experience."

Who would let you touch their machine?

 

[Lemon]

My 64 bit Win7 Professional machine has gotten slower and slower in
the almost 3 years I have had it. Right now it takes almost 5 minutes
from the time the Starting Windows screen to the Welcome screen. I am
sure it is not the number of start up programs or the anti-virus
software. I accept all updates and it could be that an imperfect
installation has corrupted the operating system. Are there any
diagnostic programs that can help? TIA.

Here's an idea:

Take the time to re-install Windows and apps, clean. But have at least
two partitions on your harddrive (or have two harddrives), one for
Windows and applications and one for data (documents, pictures etc.).

For programs that store stuff, e.g. an email program, have those
programs save their user data into a folder on the second partition (or
harddrive).

Have Windows do its updating.

Activate everything.

Now:

Use Backup and Restore (found in the Control Panel) to make a system
image of just the first partition (or harddrive) and save it to the
second partition (or harddrive).

When time comes you want a refresh, just restore the image of the first
partition or harddrive. Voila, a fresh working computer ready to hit the
road running any time you feel you want it. Just remember to run Windows
Update, and to update the Flash plugin after doing the restore to remain
safe.

'Saves endless hours to have suchly a ready-to-go image handy, and it's
all done without the need for third party software.

Note: This does not negate the need to have full backups, of course. You
might also consider making a second system image on an external harddrive.

Lemon