I'm getting a bit frustrated with my laptops startup times and I don't know what more I can do to improve it. The Vista loading bar screen is up for about 3 minutes and the bar must pass the screen about 30-40 times. It's not frozen because you can see the hard disk loading all it's data (the hard disk isn't bad by the way) although the hard disk light does go off for about 30 secs before it finally comes up to the login screen. But I am totally confused as to why it's taking so long. My specs are an AMD x2 Athlon 2Ghz with 4GB RAM, easily good enough for Vista - to put this into context, my flat mate's laptop only has 1GB RAM but the loading bar is up for about 15 seconds, then the desktop instantly shows - all on a measly (for Vista) 1GB! I have cleaned my system, defragged, disabled startup programmes (not that that would make any difference for the loading screen of Windows) and been into MSCONFIG to change things like how many CPUs it uses during boot, but nothing is working. Any ideas here? Because the startup process on this thing is SO laggy! Thanks

hi just for info vista only boots off one cpu (core) so changing it will make no difference, Have you tested your ram ? & have you tried just 2 gig of ram does it improve boot time? i ve read somewhere some pcs have probs with 4 gig of ram Check what services are running default vs yours http://www.blackviper.com/WinVista/...

How do you know the HDD is NOT bad? I bet that's your issue. Doesn't take much for bad surface area on the hard disk to start to really affect perfromance. There can be HDD surface area issues right out of the box (brand new). D/L & run a (free usually) HDD diagnostic tool (to make bootable floppy or *.iso for CD) for the brand of HDD that you have: Seagate/Maxtor - SeaTools, Western Digital - DataLifeguard, Fujitsu - FJDT (Fujitsu Drive Test), IBM/Hitachi/Toshiba - HDFT (Hitachi Drive Fitness Test) etc. Just another stupid saying...

Well I have ran chkdsk sector scans and it's never had a problem, although I have never ran a utility by the drive manufacturer (Hitachi) So I would like to but... I don't have a floppy drive and I have no CD-RWs - is there anyway I can run one of these tools?

If your HDD is a Hitachi HDD, the HDFT will work (and you can do Sector repairs as well. The Hitachi tool will function as a surface scan tool on other Mfgs HDDs, but the repair utilities will not work). Look under Drive Fitness test on this link. http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/suppo... Your laptop may have a CD/DVD burner, if not, you would need to have someone make that CD for you. See the CD image (2,720 K) link to an *.iso, this makes a bootable CD disk. Or you could get/borrow a USB floppy drive, make a bootable floppy disk: See Diskette creator for Windows OS (2,130 K). Then boot to the floppy (which would show up as an external USB device or Removable Device in your boot order in your systems BIOS or in Boot Menu at startup). There is an "Exerciser" in the HDFT tool as well that should be run also. This tests the mechanical components. HDFT User Guide: http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/suppo... Just another stupid saying...

I have two healthy Vista systems and my Vista loading bars pass 24-26 times, each pass taking about 2.5 sec. On of my systems is ( a Desktop ) with P4 3.0 GHz HT / 2 GB RAM and the other is ( a Notebook ) with Core 2 Duo T8400 2.4 GHz / 3 GB RAM. Nothing wrong with 30 passes. But please note that I have put into Manual many of the Services that my systems do not need and my systems boot right off the HDDs. Regards SuatCINI

Do you or did you ever attach to a domain? I had this same problem with a vista laptop that I used to take to a remote site and log on to their domain. When I would get home and try to boot, it would try to attach/find that domain for about 3 minutes before it gave up "looking" and booted normally.