Slow Boot and Shut down

[johndemon89]

Hi guys, was hoping to get some help with a laptop I was given. Its a Dell Studio 1537 with Vista home premium 32bit on it. It has 3gb of ram and an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU T6400@2.0 GHZ.

I've already disabled startup programs, defragmented the hard drive, ran several virus scans and the boot time is pretty long. When I turn the laptop on the loading bar for windows loads in about 15-20 seconds but then it hangs on a blank black screen for about a minute and a half sometimes longer. Once the login screen appears load up is relatively quick. I've checked the event viewer and I see many boot up and shut down errors, not sure what I do next. This is my first post I apologize if I haven't included all needed information.

Event viewer boot up entries:


Event 103 Diagnostics Performance
This startup service took longer than expected to startup, resulting in a performance degradation in the system start up process:
File Name : audioendpointbuilder
Friendly Name : Windows Audio Service
Version : 6.0.6000.16386 (vista_rtm.061101-2205)
Total Time : 1241ms
Degradation Time : 316ms
Incident Time (UTC) : 11/14/2013 2:49:23 PM


Event 106- Diagnostics Performance
Background optimizations (prefetching) took longer to complete, resulting in a performance degradation in the system start up process:
Name : BackgroundPrefetchTime
Total Time : 72484ms
Degradation Time : 25827ms

Event 110
Session manager initialization caused a slow down in the startup process:
Name : SMSSInit
Total Time : 22129ms
Degradation Time : 14240ms

Event 101
This application took longer than usual to start up, resulting in a performance degradation in the system startup process:
File Name : explorer.exe
Friendly Name : Windows Explorer
Version : 6.0.6000.16386 (vista_rtm.061101-2205)
Total Time : 4102ms
Degradation Time : 2992ms

 

[geofelt]

The easy fix might to use sleep to ram(not hibernate) instead of a complete shut down.
That assumes that you can leave power connected.

Can you replace your hard drive with a ssd? It will absolutely transform the performance of your laptop for everything, not just startup.
I have done this on all my laptops, even older ones with nice results.

 

[johndemon89]

Wont be upgrading to SSD drives anytime soon, so I'm stuck with what I have. Anything in the event viewer that seems fishy?

 

[geofelt]

Laptops use 5400rpm drives to save power. They are notoriously slow.

You might check your programs and features for bloatware that you can uninstall.
Some antivirus programs can impact you. Try Microsoft security essentials. It is free, and very low overhead.