Startup Problem

[poisonjam]

Hello!

I am having a very annoying problem with Vista x64 Home Premium - at least I think it is because of Vista. I have tried a few things that I could think of what would be the problem, alas nothing has worked and so I am posting here.

After the rolling green bars of starting up vista, the hard drive makes alot of noise (lots of disk activity?), vista takes 5-10 seconds longer. The noise is very annoying! And I'm concerned that it will ruin the hard drive. Plus my 20 second bootup is also longer.

This started happening after two months living with vista - didnt happened at day one.

I noticed the problem after installing new drivers for my VGA and manually installing some vista/office 2007 security updates. Coincidence? I've tried uninstalling the drivers and installing new ones - but no luck. I've also tried chkdsk /r in an elevated privledge command prompt and a defrag, anti-virus scan and spyware scan. Furthermore, the only thing I have changed in the boot up sequence is: adding 4 core cpu support when booting up, and stopping a few startup items. I have also disabled the readyboost service.

Specs: Intel Q6600, DFI X38, Crucial Ballistix 4GB, 160GB WD Raptor, Asus 8800GT, Corsair 620W.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

[Barman58]

Hello Poisonjam and welcome to the forums,

you may wish to work through these tutorials

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/91467-startup-repair.html


http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/66978-system-files-sfc-command.html

 

[poisonjam]

Hi! Thanks for your reply, I have tried both possible solutions. Startup repair said there wern't any problems, and sfc said there were no violations. Any more things I could try?

Guess I'm going to have to reformat - which is s shame as this is no guarantee that this won't happen in the future. This is also the second time im going to reformat as the first was very dodgy - programes won't install, wouldn't connect to any network etc.

Not a happy vista user.

 

[roy69]

Have you tried a spyware check.
Have you checked update to see if any updates have failed. This could cause some grinding.
Check your error logs to see if any programs are failing to work at startup.
This can be acheaved through computer management.
Check your reliability and performance monitor.

 

[poisonjam]

Hi Roy69, thanks for your help

Spyware check - no spyware found according to Spybot S&D

Failed updates - yes, there are some, but after doing another update all failed updates were succesfully installed

Error logs: two errors pop alot and the only errors within hour of booting the computer:

> system health report: Event filter with query "SELECT * FROM __InstanceModificationEvent WITHIN 60 WHERE TargetInstance ISA "Win32_Processor" AND TargetInstance.LoadPercentage > 99" could not be reactivated in namespace "//./root/CIMV2" because of error 0x80041003. Events cannot be delivered through this filter until the problem is corrected.

> Unable to initialize the security package Kerberos for server side authentication. The data field contains the error number.

performance monitor (not sure what I'm looking for here)

system health report (no errors found here)

 

[roy69]

Do you still get the same problems now the failed updates have been installed.

 

[poisonjam]

Yeh same problems with everything successfully updated - even the ones that initially failed

 

[roy69]

The only other thing I can think of to check would be the hard drive its self. A grinding hd is also concern it may fail.
Boot into safe mode and run chkdsk.
Also backup any data you are going to need to keep.
There are plenty of free disk management programs you can download for free but as I dont/havent needed them I can not recommend one.

You said you upgraded your graphics and a few other things.

Other things to try when you boot into safe mode.

Delete all your graphics drivers and delete the graphics device from device driver (last resort), when you boot back up your computer will say it has found new hardware and reinstall.

Try to restore to a previous setting.

Try removing software that has been updated.

These are all last resort things to try as you are removing things to find the culprit.

 

[acdcfan]

How old is your machine?
Maybe extra hard drive activity comes form Vista caching the files into ram? Do you know what I am talking/writing about?
Basically what vista does it caches most frequently used programs into RAM for quicker response. So if you open my documents folder frequently, Vista will cache it into memory so it opens a lot quicker compared to a folder/file/ programme that is not.
My Boot time is around 45 seconds from when I see green bars. It will take approximately 8 scrolling bars before it moves further than I will have black screen for about 10 second. All that before I can log in.
Next time you start your computer open task manager by pressing Ctrl+Alt +Delete key and look under Physical Memory. You should see cached memory going up and free space going down,
Refer this picture below



If you reinstall it hard drive activity will increase due to indexing of files for faster searching + caching. Some times hard drive activity coudl be due to creating system restore point as well.