Question about a Vista computer just slower than molasses

[Gwaihir]

As I mentioned in my first post I did investigate with Task Manager but I was looking at percentage of CPU time rather than memory. I'll try looking at Reliability Monitor probably later today. I haven't tried Safe Mode yet as I ran out of time last night.

I realise this thread was started by Nikilet some time ago but thought it was ok to post as I appeared to be having an identical problem.

 

[ilikefree]

I think you have something running in the background that is not part of Vista.
We will track it down and see if we can speed up your start up

 

[Gwaihir]

It would be good to track it down rather than going for the 'brute force' approach of a re-install. In my experience all versions of Windows seem to suffer from this slow-down syndrome. I built my current desktop system about 3 years ago and built a second one for my wife less than a year ago. They use slightly different mainboards but the same processor, same RAM and both run Windows 7 Professional 64-bit. Hers boots up to the login screen far faster than mine and shuts down faster too. Mine is definitely running slower than it did when new. Applications take longer to launch. Of course I've got a lot more stuff installed on mine so that might be part of the explanation but I don't understand what makes it take longer to get to the login. It must be loading up a lot of extra stuff. I don't know if there are any logs I could look at to compare the two.

Anyway that's an issue for the Windows 7 Forum but just points up the kind of problems that seem to bedevil Windows. I'm grateful for your help in trying to pinpoint this issue. Let me know if you'd like me to start a new thread.

 

[Gwaihir]

Hi again ilikefree, this is the latest:-

I started it up normally and it finished booting quite quickly this time though I wasn't timing it. After the System tray was fully populated the disk activity paused for a few seconds then there was another sustained burst so I launched Task Manager and took a look at processes from all users. The biggest chunk of memory was being used by a process called MsMpEng.exe Antimalware Service Executable which I presume is a Microsoft service and ok BUT I noticed that a Rapport service was still running and when I tried to stop it I was denied access.

I then restarted in Safe Mode, went through the steps you suggested and sure enough there was a Trusteer folder still in Program Files so I deleted that. There was no Trusteer folder in %appdata% so I restarted again normally, launched Task Manager and verified that the Rapport service was no longer there. Then I shut the laptop down.

I waited a couple of minutes before starting up again and timed the boot. The total time to the Systray fully populated was 1m 20sec and that included 12 secs to enter a BIOS password and 15 secs for Windows login, so I'd say it looks like you've cracked it. Many grateful thanks!!

I'll probably consider doing this on my Win7 system now.

 

[ilikefree]

That's good to hear.
MsMpEng.exe is Microsoft Security Essentials and it would have been doing a quick scan.
If it becomes a problem let me know and we will configure it to scan later and not at start up.
Again good to hear we are on the right track, so often we don't get feed back.
Clean up with CCleaner, do a defrag and you should be good for a while.

 

[ilikefree]

Nikilet could you go to task manager and look at Processes, Memory and see what is using most of your memory
I have left instructions on an earlier post on how to do that. Thanks