Win7 boot up time
 

Recently I built a media center for my in-laws that they have connected to their 60" Sony DLP 1080i TV. It has Windows 7 on a 64GB SSD and when building it used my own 42" LG 1080p TV - the system seriously boot up in about 10-12 seconds, I also tested it connected to a crappy little 15" computer monitor...same boot time. After connecting to their TV the computer takes upwards of 3-5 minutes to boot into Windows....

Does that make sense?

I thought it was weird so I brought it back home with me and put it back on my TV and it boot up extremely fast again.

Would a TV or HDMI cable be the cause of an extremely slow bootup time? To me that doesn't seem like a logical issue...but that is the only thing that's changed.

HDMI?

I don't know about HDMI, but my Win7 bootup is REALLY slow if I have an external hard drive plugged in. Leave it unplugged when booting, and it boots normally.

I thought it could possibly be the HDMI cables but I really don't see how that would effect it.

Also there no external hard drives connected to it at all. All it's plugged into is a router and HDMI to TV.

Is AVG installed?

One thing to take into account is what else is different about the in-law setup. Is the keyboard and mouse different? Any other devices attached to the PC? Printer? Is it connecting to a wireless network or anything at the in-laws house? What else is different about it there rather than at your house?

AVG is installed - however it was installed when it was at my house.

The router is the exact same and configured the exact same way that I had it at my house (acting as a wireless bridge using DD-WRT).

The mouse and keyboard were also the exact same until recently - still took forever to boot with the original keyboard/mouse vs. the new media keyboard (has trackball and mouse functionality on it) at their house

The only other peripheral is an IR Remote - but that was just recently added.

When building it I tried to make it as "plug 'n play" as possible so that I wouldn't have to mess around with it when setting it up at their place. I even changed my network to emulate theirs - with the same encryption/pw/bridge setup. EVERYTHING!

The only thing that I couldn't replicate was their p.o.s. Sony TV at my house.


I just hate that it does that because it makes me look like crap making them a really really nice computer that takes about a damn year to load.

My guess would be that it's looking for primary monitor (video device) and then it waits until some timeout. Try again and set the monitors like they are supposed to be (TV etc).

Yours
ZB

Disable AVG and try it again. You might have to go to services.msc and disable the AVG services, not just taking it out of start up. I know it makes no sense, but neither does the delay on the Sony.

A lot of people don't realise it but displays DO talk to the computer they're plugged into. I'm willing to bet that for some reason the TV is what's doing it, maybe it's a DRM thing taking longer than it should.

One issue here COULD be the HDMI handshake. HDMI has a built in anti theft protocol and this means that some verification needs to take place between the TV-circuits and the graphic card on the PC. If the HDMI versions are different (PC/TV) it can generate some problems, in some cases. I haven't read up on this though.

I have an old Sony TV and a new HTPC and my sound always gets a 2 second start-delay, so I hear no system sounds since they are short. I think it just takes my old TV 2 secs to give ok to the PC on the sound. But my boot time is fine (though without logon sound).

There is a lot out there on these handshake problems.

Other tips
1: set your bios to show all the POST messages (instead of logo)
2: boot into windows safe mode to see if it is faster
3: MS used to have a software that logged the time it spent on everything during boot. (bootvis I think it was called)

EDIT: Instead of bootvis you can use WinBootInfo for free for 30 days. Link to article that includes download link:

WinBootInfo is a BootVis Alternative that Works in Windows Vista and 7 | Raymond.CC Blog

Hmm...Interesting - I'll try that next time I go to their house