Am I asking too much?

wbarnhill

wbarnhill

Final Approach
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Feb 26, 2005
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Greenwood, SC
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iEXTERMINATE
Dell Precision M4400, running Windows XP Pro 32-bit, Core 2 duo @ 3.06 Ghz, 3.48GB RAM (4GB), Seagate 7200RPM 3Gbps SATA.

Boot times from power up:

To XP load screen: 10 seconds
To Login prompt: 50 seconds
To Desktop: 1 minute 40 seconds

The only additional software running at startup aside from what was with the system has been Symantec Endpoint and Snagit.

Is it unreasonable for me to think that my computer should be booting a bit quicker than this? I know my Mac did, even when booting Windows.

Updated the BIOS, but no perceptible change. Keyboard input gets sluggish sometimes too. Throttling is turned off. Suggestions? (besides get rid of the Dell. It's a work laptop. I can't help it.)
 
Maybe. That doesn't sound horribly slow, and Symantec is a bloated hog in itself...

But the keyboard lag is troubling. How's the subjective responsiveness when navigating the filesystem? If it seems a little sluggish, sometimes it can mean filesystem corruption. Run a CHKDSK /f .

Same for a fragmented MFT or pagefile. Running an analysis in Defrag will reveal either, but Defrag will fix neither. There's no built-in utility to fix either problem in Windows.

In my experience, once the MFT gets busted into anything more than six or so fragments (there should be two -- the MFT and a backup of itself), the performance hit starts getting noticeable. Anything less than six fragments I usually leave alone, because it's time-consuming and slightly risky to fix. It requires the use of bootable utilities, as well. (I usually use Paragon, but there are others.)

Doing a thorough Defrag and then resetting the pagefile to a static size of 1.5 times RAM (but never less than 1024 MB ) can also improve things a lot. If the pagefile is fragmented to start with, I either run PageDefrag first, or else disable the pagefile altogether, reboot, and then rebuild it as a contiguous file. But running PageDefrag has the added benefit of defragmenting the registry.

Speaking of which, a dirty registry can be a real performance hit. The best overall consumer-grade registry cleaner I know of is the one built into CCleaner. It's perhaps not as thorough as some (such as Comodo's System Cleaner), but it makes fewer mistakes. I've never had it make a really, really bad mistake; and it offers to make a backup before making any changes, just in case it does bork something.

Also check to see whether the System Restore files are fragmented. If so, disabling System Restore and re-enabling it will cure that problem. I also tend to disable the indexing service, which usually results in a noticeable improvement.

-Rich
 
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Didn't notice the pagefile. They had it set to 1024. :mad2:

After upping that it seems to be a bit better. I'll keep an eye on things.

They keyboard sluggishness comes and goes, I'll see if I can't figure out what's going on when it does it. Thanks for the assist!
 
Any time.

A lot of times, making almost any change to the pagefile seems to speed things up. I think it gets corrupted in ways that the usual utilities don't always detect because on many occasions, rebuilding a pagefile that showed up normal has solved system problems that defied other fixes.

Making it static reduces its resource use, however; so I routinely disable the dynamic ("Windows-managed") pagefile. A dynamic pagefile made sense back when 1 GB drives were considered huge and storage was expensive. Nowadays, not so much.

-Rich
 
Boottime is one of my pet peeves with computers. The PC is clocking micro-instructions at 3 Billion times per second, and yet, it still takes nearly 120 seconds to boot. Anyway...

I use a tool called Startup Delayer to delay/phase-in the launch of various non-critical programs by a user selectable number of seconds/minutes.

I launch a lot of stuff at boot (Open Office quickstart, Yahoo IM, Google Desktop, plus a few other apps). But, I rarely need any of this stuff when I first boot (typically I just want a web browser so that I can check email).

Anyway, Startup Delayer helped get me to a useable OS pretty quickly. Probably saved 1-2 minute in my startup times.





wbarnhill said:
Dell Precision M4400, running Windows XP Pro 32-bit, Core 2 duo @ 3.06 Ghz, 3.48GB RAM (4GB), Seagate 7200RPM 3Gbps SATA.

Boot times from power up:

To XP load screen: 10 seconds
To Login prompt: 50 seconds
To Desktop: 1 minute 40 seconds

The only additional software running at startup aside from what was with the system has been Symantec Endpoint and Snagit.

Is it unreasonable for me to think that my computer should be booting a bit quicker than this? I know my Mac did, even when booting Windows.

Updated the BIOS, but no perceptible change. Keyboard input gets sluggish sometimes too. Throttling is turned off. Suggestions? (besides get rid of the Dell. It's a work laptop. I can't help it.)
Click to expand...
 
nyoung said:
Boottime is one of my pet peeves with computers. The PC is clocking micro-instructions at 3 Billion times per second, and yet, it still takes nearly 120 seconds to boot. Anyway...
Click to expand...

Anyone remember that video of the guys that used many many solid-state
drives to boot a windoze computer with a bazzilion apps in something
like 3 or 4 seconds?
 
For the periodic slowdowns, you might want to monitor task manager for a few days processes sorted by high CPU. Numerous Win services are objects of "overuse". WMI services shows up on my company PC all the time. But then again, the company uses McAfee and encryption. My boot to usability is more than 5 minutes.
 
Solid State Drive with Win7x64: 14 seconds from power on until full functionality, other specs similar.
 
This is an out of the box dell with symantec added?

IMO - format the sucker and do a clean XP install w/o all the crap Dell adds.
 
Bob Noel said:
Anyone remember that video of the guys that used many many solid-state
drives to boot a windoze computer with a bazzilion apps in something
like 3 or 4 seconds?
Click to expand...

A long time ago I was building computer hardware for fun (I was living somewhere insanely BORING at the time and working too many hours/week) I took the computer's operating system memory right after bootup and loaded it onto EEPROM's and put it on a custom IO card. At power up, it was set to run that card first. Bootup time was about as fast as you could get your finger off the power switch. The hard drive was still spooling up and the cursor was already on the screen ready to go.

I tell ya though, my 1MHz Apple IIe can still boot faster from a floppy disk than any bazillion MIPS PC I've ever seen.
 
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