Super long startup is bugging me

[Zero Angel]

I have a laptop with Vista 64-bit and am being annoyed by a really long delay from when the time the desktop shows up to the time it becomes actually usable. My laptop is a rather fast one and I have 4GB of RAM, so I dont think the specs are the bottleneck here, it's gotta be a specific program or service.

Heres what happens:

1) I log in
2) Desktop, taskbar, and sidebar appear almost immediately -- some programs load and show up in the system tray.
3) The hard drive light is flashing like the harddrive is under very heavy load, for 2 minutes -- the sidebar shows the CPU usage at a mere ~20% for both cores. If I ctrl-alt-del, the task manager shows no more than 5% of any given process.
4) FINALLY I will get a notification that wireless and bluetooth are both on. Programs like firefox will launch slower while the hard drive continues to grind
5) After 5 total minutes from logging in the hard drive light will stop and everything will work quickly.

I want to isolate what the problem is so that I can fix it but the task manager doesnt give me useful info (because the whole problem seems to be related to disk i/o and not CPU or RAM usage). Can anyone point me in the right direction?

[TheJamsh]

A serious defragging needed perhaps? But i have a feeling thats something you would have thought of...

[Nielk1]

Defrag and clean you registry too?

[Zero Angel]

I'll try these. Somehow I doubt that the long startup time has to do with fragmentation for varying reasons. What i'm really looking for is a program or method I can use which will tell me what is doing the most Disk I/O at the current time so that I can identify what program or service is causing the problem.

[TheJamsh]

tbh, i have vista on both my laptop and desktop. both arnt that old and the laptop has the highest specs, but the desktop does take ages to become useable.

its most annoying on the laptop when i want to change the power plan from 'high performance' to 'power saver' takes freakin ages for the box to come up even when i click the icon on the taskbar.

[Zero Angel]

Hey James are both of your computers Home Premium (32-bit)? Or is any of them a 64 bit one.

[GSH]

While your HD is thrashing, turn on Task manager (or better yet, Process Explorer from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx ). Turn on the I/O reads or delta reads column, and sort by it to see what process(es) are thrashing your HD.

-- GSH

[sabrebattletank]

Welcome to windows my friend.

[Sonic]

Windows Vista is supposed to defrag your HD on spare cycles now like Linux although they still recommend you schedule a defrag time and let it run once in a while. It sounds like you have a security related task at startup like a startup anti-virus scan or something along those lines that is taking up your I/O.

[AHadley]

I'm running XP and it takes at least 5 minutes to even reach the logon screen... things are so bad I'm considering getting an external, backing up to it, and completely reformatting my PC...

[TheJamsh]

Both mine are 32-bit, i believe one is vista ultimate and the other is home premium, not entirely sure. The laptop has 3GB ram, while the desktop has two.

[Sonic]

Sysinternal's Autoruns is a neat utility that looks at everything that loads at startup including programs, services, drivers, browser hooks, etc. You can use this utility to find anything that you don't want loading or even better, find drivers that it is trying to load that no longer exists. The system wastes some cycles trying to load drivers that are no longer around.

[Zero Angel]

Thanks for mentioning ProcessExplorer -- you know I did have it but I didn't explore it too much until recently where I discovered where you could also show other stats on a process including I/O history which seems useful. Turning on most of the I/O columns doesnt appear to show me anything I can use. I tried terminating non-essential processes which were using the most I/O (like Steam) but something still tries to use my hard drive for about 10 minutes from startup. I'll just have to look harder I guess.

[GSH]

Using Process Explorer v10.2 on my home XP box (v10.2 is the last version before MS bought them out and removed the 'google this exe's name' link), if I right-click on the listview titlebar and go to 'Select Columns', the best ones to look at are Process Performance -> I/O Delta Reads, and I/O Delta Read Bytes. Maybe also I/O Delta Writes. The 'Delta' ones will show the change since the last time Process Explorer refreshed, and you can sort by a column to see who's reading/writing to your HD.

-- GSH

[Zero Angel]

Ah so 'delta' measures the 'rate' of increase or decrease -- kind of how it works in BZ2. Got it.