Toshiba Satellite L650 slow booting time inspite of new HDD and new Win 7 Home Premium 64 bit install

Question

This is a follow up of my earlier question. Using the recovery media creator (another story for another day X( ) I was successful in getting Win 7 64 bit with Toshiba drivers installed and running.

But, there has been a notable lag in the time the PC goes from "start up" to "login screen" to "logged in and ready".

1. From cold boot/restart to the login screen is nearly one min
2. From login to ready is nearly one minute.
3. Subsequently, I have added portable apps, Rocket dock and RK Launcher to be run at startup. (these take another 30 secs to come up)

So far, I have used a combination of "MSConfig" and "Autorun" tools to prune a lot of the Toshiba "support applications" from running at start up. I had used the free "Wise Registry Cleaner" tool's PC optimiser settings also. Did not help too much, so I have reverted those settings back to the computer defaults

Reiterate a few points to help people answer better:

• New HDD (1 TB, resized primary partition after Toshiba completed its Windows plus recovery+boot installs, into (a) multiple logical ex4 partitions for Linux, and, (b) one logical NTFS partition for D: in Windows)
• Brand new Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit installation done via Toshiba recovery USB creator (Lots of updates happening intermittently (SP1 update happening in background as well))
• No SSD, and do not intend to buy one. So, please avoid "buy an SSD" solutions
• I boot off USB drives and run Linux very often, so I cannot turn off that option in BIOS :)
• HW: intel i3 core CPU and integrated graphics card, with 4 GB RAM
• The most recent version of BIOS as per Toshiba tool (Insyde H2O 1.4 (I think, but I am not sure))

First question: Is this normal and acceptable boot times for my configuration. It is not, IMO, as I recall the machine used to be faster, earlier.

Second question: If it is indeed slow boot times, any suggestions other than what I have already done, or to independently complement what I have already attempted above?

P.S: When I boot off my USB drives into Linux, the same machine is amazingly fast.... From "start up" to "ready" in under a minute (regardless of distro used). So, IMO the machine itself is fine.

Thanks.

---

magicandre1981,

So, I have installed SP1 and that Enterprise Hotfix rollup so far. I am yet to notice a humanly discernible difference in boot times. Often times, I feel as though it has regressed and is lagging, but then again I am watching this pot boil, for too long now. :)

Data is king, so I am attaching a run of xbootmgr trace (boot and shutdown). Did you want me to boot in a cycle of 5-6 times like some of those tutorials/blog posts? Let me know.

Searching the net tells me that Avira and Avast have had this disk activity complaints affecting boot on earlier versions in the past (2011/2012). So, I am indeed sceptical if changing my antivir is going to make that much of a difference? So, to clarify, I am still running avira/avguard in my present setup like yesterday...

Also, take a look at the comments I had left for your previous reply in conjunction with this information (if you haven't seen it already, that is) :-)

Your thoughts on this are welcome and will be appreciated.

Here is the boot/shutdown trace (again, link valid for two days only).

Once again, thanks very much. :)

Answer 1

ok, booting to Desktop takes 32s and the system is fully booted in 116s:

timing bootDoneViaExplorer="32711" bootDoneViaPostBoot="126711"

I can see tht the HDD is the bottleneck. Your Seagate Samsung Spinpoint M8 1000GB is busy all the time:

This is bad, very bad. I can see that avguard.exe causes a lot of disk IO. So try a different AV tool instead of AntiVir or buy a SSD.

Also install the Sp1 (RTM no longer gets updates!). You should also install the Enterprise Hotfix rollup which includes some performance hotfixes for faster boot.