Windows startup can be mainly divided into three parts:
Of course there are many other possible factors which could make Windows to boot slow. Including hardware failures.
I strongly advise also to check the system and application event log (start event viewer
) and check for any errors. It might give indication about failing devices. For example if your HDD is about to fail it might cause delays by required read retries - this could delay startup a lot and decrease overall system performance.
Another approach you can try:
If your system seems to continuously access your hard drive or your CPU is always fully loaded it could have a big impact on overall performance too. Open the task manager and look for tasks which show a high CPU usage.
To get a more close overview about what's going on inside your system I recommend launching the Resource Monitor
. It will be able to show you CPU, Memory, Disk and Network activity per process. So it's easy to find processes which are causing a lot of system load.
In most cases processes which cause big Disk I/O load will have the most impact on system performance. In Resource Monitor
go to the Disk tab and sort the process list by "Total (B/sec)".
Also make sure to visit your hardware vendor update sites and update to the latest driver versions for all components.
any third party software can't make things work straight..?? – xorpower – 2011-05-29T15:46:02.883
Eventually it can. However i STRONGLY recommend to keep off any tuning tool out there. Most of them do either not work on modern Windows system or they screw up more than they help. In best case thy simply do not have any positive effect. The only thing I could recommend is to replace your A/V with Microsoft Security Essentials and run some spyware check like Spybot Search and Destroy. But seriously, do not attempt tuneup tools. – SkyBeam – 2011-05-29T15:51:31.760
2
In fact there is one tool which seems to have quite good reputation: http://www.soluto.com/. This tool seems to provide some analysis of the boot process. I've personally never used it and I would personally not recommend such tools in general. Usually it's just about some application which installs services which run nuts, broken external devices (usually USB devices) or user-space applications which use many resources. Most can be simply identified using Resource Monitor.
– SkyBeam – 2011-05-29T15:58:34.710