New Laptop came with Vista - Slow Booting Up

[awb23]

Ok this is my first laptop purchase ever, AND my first time using Vista, so I could be jumping the gun here.

Anyway I bought an HP pavilon dv9000 series laptop yesterday. It came with vista home premium.

However, it takes sometimes up to 4-5minutes to completely boot up.

Is this normal vista behavior? Or does it just come with having a laptop?

I'm used to pretty much instant boot up times with my desktop XP Pro machine.

Anything I can do?

 

[sam509]

Not normal on anything including a laptop. My laptop boots faster than it did with XP, granted that is with a clean install but either way you should not have be having 4-5 min boot times

 

[InlineFive]

Are you talking about the amount of time until the desktop appears or until the computer is fast enough to be usable? By default HP loads their consumer systems down with so much junk it's unbelievable. It's possible that of tons of unnecessary background services combined with a small amount of RAM (i.e. 512MB) is hurting performance terribly.

 

[Tipsy Turtle]

I've had 3 HP laptops, 1 of my own and 2 from work, and all three were slooooooooooow even when reinstalled without all the HP garbage loaded on them.

Thought maybe it was the 4200RPM drive in one, swapped it out for a 7200 but it wasn't much faster. Thought it was RAM, took it from 512 to 1gb, with XP, and it still wasn't any faster.

I don't know what HP does to their laptops but for whatever reason when compared to Dell, Toshiba, etc.... the load times on the HP's is always considerably longer.

 

[RyanGrob]

Even Dell's are bad. My sister just got a Dell laptop and I tried to tweak it but gave up. Decided to reinstall XP with an extra legit cd key I had laying around (gotta love being in 3 different MSDNAA programs ). Regardless, I believe InlineFive is correct in that the HP crapware is causing your problems.

 

[Shawn]

It's all the crap they put on their computers. Microsoft was concerned this would happen when they released Vista. They call the preloaded software that computer companies put on "craplets". :laugh:

Anyway, I would do a reformat and see what happens. If it's still slow have them replace it. Just make sure you don't format over the recovery partition. That way you can restore the HP crap in case they try to give you a hard time.

 

[ObscureCaucasian]

I have an HP/Compaq and it boots fast, especially with Hibernate, it only takes like 30-45 seconds to desktop

 

[Doh!]

If you decide to reinstall Vista, do a clean installation of only Vista. If you do it w/ a recovery cd from HP, you'll ended up where you've just left.

 

[nippyjun]

What are the specs of your laptop? Have you tried safe mode to see how fast that boots up. If it's fast booting in safe mode then there is probably a program, driver, etc that is slowing down the booting time. There was a program for xp that will probably work on vista that shows what happens during booting and how much time each process takes during booting. This may help you isolate the slowness. Typically it's a firewall or antivirus that slows down the boot, or possibly a network issue. I can't remember the name of the program but i'm sure someone here can chime in with the name.

If your laptop is a super cheapie one then it could take 4-5 minutes to fully load windows.

 

[jacktesterson]

not normal....with RC2 my laptop booted faster than xp home

 

[awb23]

It's a brand new laptop that cost me 1500 bucks, and it's specs are faster than my desktop. It's got the core 2 duo cpu, 2gig ram, gforce 7600, 160gb hd, the works.

To answer your question it only takes like 5-10 seconds to get to the vista screen....but then it takes another 3-4 minutes (or more) for the computer to become usable. It seems as if the vista sidebar is always the last to load, so maybe that's holding it up?

I know I should try reformating everything just to include what I want, but I didn't even see a vista CD anywhere in the box that came with my laptop. Just a recovery partition. Is that normal?

 

[D1gger]

My experience with laptops has been that they have slow hard drives. Many are 4200rpm with a relatively slow transfer rate. When comparing to a desktop that has a 7500rpm or even 10,000rpm you are bound to notice a significant difference in bootup time. That being said, HP does load a bunch of crap software on their laptops and that just makes it even slower. A clean install of Vista using an actual copy of Vista (not a recovery disk from HP) should improve things.

I would also check your device manager just to make sure that all of your hardware drivers are working properly (no yellow exclamation marks). I have seen device drivers in the past that were malfunctioning and causing slow boot times.

 

[Chadder007]

Ive seen one that was loaded with Norton Antivirus.....Norton caused it to be unGodly slooooowww. Uninstalling it and reinstalling AVG did the trick.

 

[Tencntraze]

Oddly enough, the Vista dev machine that I have at work takes literally 5-10 minutes to boot up when I restart it; my coworker had to snag the machine for some of his own dev work, and gave up because it didn't boot up in 10 minutes (I have the magic touch, apparently). The computer is a 3GHz Xeon w/ 2GB Ram and a 9800 Radeon, so there's nothing that's outstanding about this configuration that would cause it to boot slower. Perhaps because it's a Dell and there is some weird quirk or other with the MB? Also, I think I read somewhere, probably here, about there being a tool in Vista that tells you what's slowing the machine down.

 

[BehindEnemyLines]

I agree, that doesn't sound normal for brand new laptop. I just installed Vista Business on my dated laptop, and it takes almost exactly 60sec from pressing enter in the dual-boot menu, type in the password, and reach to a usable desktop. It's even faster with ReadyBoost enabled using a 1GB SD memory card by about 10sec. Of course, all I have is NOD32 v2.70.23, so that's probably why. Still trying to find a Vista compatible firewall. A bit slower than XP for now. We'll see if it'll improve. Have you called HP for an actual copy of the Vista DVD OEM - not the restore CD/partition? Ask if they'll send you one for a free or small charge.

Then make a complete IMAGE of the HARD DRIVE. Vista Backup can make a complete IMAGE of the entire hard drive although I am not sure if it allows you to select hidden partitions. Or just uninstall any and all programs you don't use.

I have a Dell Inspiron 700m
Pentium-M 1.6GHz
768MB RAM
60GB 4200rpm HD
Intel 855GM graphics (I don't like the Basic Theme at all...it's ugh)