VERY slow startup

[simonp820]

Hi,

We have four PCs at home and have just bought a new Vaio S series with the Pentium mobile chip but it's really slow to startup.

The other PCs turn on and go to Windows in less than 30 seconds - the Vaio takes around 2-2.5 minutes.

Someone told me this in typical of Vaios but I'm not that happy that a £1600 laptop takes that long to turn on.

Is this true? Is it just me? Is there anything I can do?

Cheers

Simon

[William]

Hi,

We have four PCs at home and have just bought a new Vaio S series with the Pentium mobile chip but it's really slow to startup.

The other PCs turn on and go to Windows in less than 30 seconds - the Vaio takes around 2-2.5 minutes.

Someone told me this in typical of Vaios but I'm not that happy that a £1600 laptop takes that long to turn on.

Is this true? Is it just me? Is there anything I can do?

Cheers

Simon

Are the other PC's desktops? My own 3.2 P4 desktop boots really fast.

I would suspect that with your high spec Vaio Laptop you got a lot of preinstalled software and utilities which all take time to load.

I doubt it would be a hardware problem, for instance my little TR5 to which I have added loads of Startup stuff over time takes forever to boot because its looking for printers, network devices and my Bluetooth phone.

I put up with it, but I am sure a lot of boot time could be saved by stopping things loading which you consider unnecessary.

[robinsonchristopher]

I have a sony Vaio VGN-S5XP/B which I've had for about a month and when I first got it, I was also in the same situation as yourself. Even compared to previous laptops the start-up times this Vaio model was achieving were terrible.

As William pointed out it has to do with the pre-installed software that Sony decides to throw at us. Most of it is pathetic trial versions anyway, such as Moodlogic, the encrypt disc utility, etc. So firstly if like me you don't need them, un-install them, or at least edit the start-up entries so the programs don't start up with Window's.

Such items as the Vaio launcher (media utility thing) which if you disable them to not start-up with Window's can significantly increase load times during boot.

Basically if you want optimum load times on start-up just don't have anything running apart from critical Window's processes and your graphics drivers as well.

Although for myself personally I prefer the 2 minutes it takes my S5XP/B to load, I have got it to load within 30 seconds with minimal start-up entries, BUT when I want to load up Photoshop or anything like that, it takes forever to load the chosen program, whereas for the sake of a long start-up time, all my main programs then can load instantly from the background.

Your choice though whats good for you, my laptop stays on for about 5 hours at a time on average, so 2/3 minutes start-up is nothing compared to that anyway.

[CharlyChango]

I've got the S5M, and it boots in about 20 sec. I removed all the stuff like the antivirus, and some other sony programs, shutted down some services, etc. But there's still some things I can improve. Anyway, when I got all this stuff running, the boot up was normal and not as much as 2 / 3 minutes. See that you've got all the hardware well configured, and in the worst case you can change the "Prefetcher" parameters from the registry.

robinsonchristopher

You can change the load time of the applications by prefetching them too.

This is the key for the registry. You can set 1, 2 or 3. With 1, the booting is prefetched, with 2 the applications, and with 3 both. Remember to clean the "prefetcher" directory on c:\WINDOWS\ after making any changes, and once a month to improve the performance. You have to boot a couple of times before seeing some improvements.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory]
"EnablePrefetcher"=dword:00000003

This works by making a preboot file the first time you run applications, so each time you run it again it uses that file to do it faster. It's a feature that is going to be even improved in Windows Vista.

[kee-lo_]

What I want to know is why did they include that encrypt disk thing anyway?

[simonp820]

Hi,

How can I stop programs I don't need from loading at startup? Which ones should I stop?

Cheers

Simon

[CharlyChango]

First of all I'd uninstall all the programs you don't use. It's often, for example, the SafeGuard PrivateDisk, some of the Symantec programs, etc.

After that, you can choose what programs you want at startup with msconfig. Start => Run => msconfig. Under the last tab -¿"Boot"? Sorry but I've got it in spanish - you will see checked all the programs that your computer runs. Google the .exe files to know what they do and choose and uncheck the ones you don't want. If you have any more problems with this, just ask here.

The startup can be slow too because you haven't finished configuring your computer yet - installing patches, some hardware, registration, ... - Sometimes after you uninstall the programs you're not going to use and that remain unconfigured, you fix this stuff unintentionally.

Hope this helps.

[jumpsuit]

Another easy way to manage your startup programs is by using
'TuneUp Utilities'

If you have ZoneAlarm you also have the option to 'kill' programs if you don't want to uninstall them or you only use them rarely.