HP Pavilion laptop issues
 

Once again, I need to reach out to my smart friends at TFP. My HP Pavilion laptop is taking forever to start. I get the logon page ok, but once I log in to my account, it takes forever for everything to load. This morning it took over 20 minutes! I cannot live with this. 20 minutes for the explorer bar, background, icons, etc. to even think of opening. Yesterday I thought it was not starting at all, so I performed a system restore back to 8/15 and it 'seemed' ok. But this morning, not so much.

What can I do to fix this? and can I leave it in sleep mode all day so I don't have to wait again when I need it later?

As always, I appreciate any help you can offer.

Do you run spyware/adware checks, using programs such as Spybot S&D or Ad-Aware?

If you don't, those things can bog down your system like that.

Or run malwarebytes to see if some trojan is on your system.

It's all that sexy firemen porn she is looking at.

I'm going to help her out later when I'm off work.

And by "Help her out" I mean, probe her ports with my gigabit dongle. Yeah, you know what I'm saying. *wink wink nudge nudge* say no more.

...her system....she's a "goer," ay?!

It sounds as if you might have a malware problem (virus/trojan). Try SpyBot & Ad-Aware as BG suggested.

If that's not the issue, and it's just that there are some programs that are taking forever to load, you might want to check out Soluto... it will tell you how long a particular program is taking to load, and what most other users have done in that situation (it uses "crowd-sourcing" to maintain a database of what others have done). It's a very handy program.

You can google any of these programs for download, but Soluto (the least well known) is at:

Soluto ? Anti-Frustration Software

I have Spybot, Ad-Aware and a Malware program. I ran them before I did the system restore. I guess I should run them again. And the virus scan too. Should I de-frag?

Leave it to Eden to turn a computer problem into something sexual. Thanks for lightening up my mood. ;)

Run a fragmentation scan... if it says you should de-frag it, go ahead... it won't hurt. Running MSCONFIG and looking for unnecessary programs/services that load on startup might help as well, but might be intimidating, depending on your level of confidence about messing around at that level.

Greywolf that's what I plan on doing tonight, I'm going to log into her system remotely using my work's onetime use software and take a look at msconfig.

I take it that this machine is about 1-2 years old, to me it sounds like it's time for a clean reinstall of the OS (or change OS ).
In my experience Windows based OS have to be reinstalled every 12-24 months to clean out garbage that Windows collects over time.

Best of luck,
Yours
ZB

Might be time to upgrade to 7!

Your workplace may enable you to get an education discount, and the way they designed the install for 7 is really smooth and easy to do.

If you'd like to visit the city... I'll be happy to refresh your drive :)

You know, Cyn. I may have to take you up on that offer. After I get back from my vacation we will find a weekend that I am without children and I will come to the city.

In the meantime, I have ran Spybot and cleared those up. I ran Ad Aware and cleared those up. I left it on today when I went to work, running Malwarebytes (or whatever it is called). I ran disk clean up. When I get home, I will run the virus scan and de-frag.

I am bringing with me on vacation regardless, even if it means waiting 30 minutes for it to start. I hate feeling disconnected, especially from TFP.

I'm bumping this thread to see if anyone has any other ideas. I remotely logged on to her pc and did all the things listed here. I ran malbytes, ccleaner, and cleaned up her msconfig. I rebooted with nothing in startup and still took 30. Ccleaner cleared up 1.2 gb of stuff and malbytes only found one item.

Her antivirus was listed as being a huge resource hog so I uninstalled it and installed avast. Still taking forever. I ran defraggler and her drive was at 30% fragmented. I got it down to 5% and freed up 18gb. She has almost half of her 160gb drive free.

She has 2gb of ram and a 1.6ghz celeron mobile. Even over remote connection her system isn't that laggy while in windows, it's just booting up. I think she may have a VPN connection to her work but that shouldn't slow it down that much.

She is still having 30 mintue boot times and I'm stumped. I'm thinking a format and reload is the next step but I can't do that over remote connection. Anyone else have any ideas?

Go to Device Manager and see if anything is showing an issue. Sometimes hardware malfunctions can result in a lengthy boot.

damn, I was in Hicksville today. I should have thought it out a bit and could have at least picked up the laptop if she could meet me there.

Anyways, when it boots to safe mode does it also still take 30 minutes? I'm wondering if there's a hardware conflict or something. Is there anything in the event logs?

There is an utility at Microsoft Technet called autoruns (and it's free). That will list every thing that is scheduled at startup. Included in the list is where that item comes from and the author if known. Directly in the list of items each item can be disable or deleted even has shortcut to search on the web for more information.
One thing that I learned once was that some services do actually startup even if they are set to manual start, I noticed this with some SQLserver services that take a long time to start.

Yours
ZB

Does Medi use an external mouse, keyboard, or webcam with the laptop? If so, disconnect those to see if they are causing slow boot times.

Have you tried chkdsk/r, chkdsk/f, fixboot, and fixmbr?

You could update the drivers through the hp website.

I have not tried that yet. I will do it soon and let you know.

---------- Post added at 10:32 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:31 PM ----------

I do not use an external mouse, keyboard or webcam. Everything is built in.

Since everything else seems to have been tried but a clean wipe, I guess doing a drive check is the next thing I can think of.

Well, aside from a hardware conflict.

Did we solve the problem yet?

Nope. I thought it was solved. But I was wrong. Yesterday, Windows updates were automatically installed and then it took 2 minutes to sign in after logging in. I was thrilled!

This morning. 20 minutes again.

Is something trying to call home?
Have you done the safe mode start yet?

No, I haven't tried the safe mode yet. Do I do safe mode with or without networking?

I tried starting up in safe mode, with and without networking. It started up in no time. Less than 2 minutes each time. Still takes 20 minutes when starting regularly.

The october issue of PC World recommended a program called Soluto, which analyzes your boot and lets you know what programs and services are starting in the background, and then lets you choose which programs/services start with your boot, and which ones you can delay until they are needed. I ran it, and shaved 30 seconds off my boot time!

Only 30 seconds? I need to shave like 30 minutes! But I guess it wouldn't hurt to try. Thanks, Lucifer.