This morning I timed it - from the time I hit the “on button” on my computer at work, to the time I could open and read a word document off the system, it took 13 minutes.
That wait really annoys me. Is that normal for an office environment? (It’s a law firm with multiple offices around the state.) What is going on behind the scenes that takes sooo long?
In our office, the machines are scrubbed of all the little start up programmes I have at home and they boot up pretty quickly.
What part of the process is taking the longest? From boot up to login screen or login screen to being able to start up a programme or open a file?
Boot to login takes a couple of minutes. The main delay is from login to being able to start working.
It could be running a virus, spyware, or adware scans before it loads the registry into memory.
It may be all the programs running in the background. There is a neat little program called WinPatrol that gives a much clearer explanation of what these programs are. It also lets you disable, rather than remove, any you think you won’t need. If a problem results, you can re-enable them. it used to be free, and I hope it still is. Google it.
It has an annoying way of barking at you when it finds something it thinks is wrong, so after installing it, you may want to delete it from you system tray, and go to Programs when you want to check the Startup items.
You can’t put the machine in hibernate mode? Very fast startup for me and I’m back where I left off.
Try running autoruns is there much in the “logon” sections ?
You turn your computer off? I just leave mine on
Okay, more seriously, there are a number of ways to attack the problem. Assuming this is Windows XP or Vista, then you can click Start then Run, then type msconfig to determine which apps run at startup. You should also check that you have sufficient memory to run those apps. Press Ctrl+Shift+Escape all together to bring up the task manager and click on the Performance tab. You want to make sure that the memory used does not exceed the available memory - this is easily fixed by adding more memory. A third possibility is that something behind the scenes is getting stuck and waiting to time out: you can check for that by looking in the Event Viewer - System and Application logs.
REFORMAT!
Oh… I see that this is a work computer. Depending on what permissions you have, it may be hard to do much of anything about the problem without IT wrath. Best to get one of them on the job. 13 minutes to boot is insane.
13 minutes sounds really excessive. A reasonably modern computer with Vista boots in less than a minute. I guess it would take a few minutes for a slightly older computer, but 13 is way too long.
My old PC too approx. 10 minutes from button push to fully functional bootup (including network login). The replacement laptop I got a few months ago boots up in under 2 minutes - probably closer to 1 minute.
I asked one of our IT guys about it: our company has two network domains - a legacy one (which IT isn’t directly administering any longer) and a newer one. Since my old laptop had been on the legacy domain, they were managing systems via a lot of login scripts and checksums, and other stuff loaded and executed during bootup to keep some measure of parity between PCs on different domains. But when I got my new laptop, they set it up on the new domain, which didn’t need all the junk to load during login since permissions, network drive mappings, etc. are applied right from the Active Directory settings.
So if your company has recently implemented a new domain but you still log into the old one, that may explain the issue.
My new work PC takes at least six minutes from pressing the power button to being usable. And that’s with a 2.2 GHz Core2 Duo processor.
Behind the scenes, your network is loading in policies, mapping network share drives, inspecting configurations and software patch levels, verifying that the antivirus is up to date and running, and a whole bunch of other infrastructure housekeeping that a home PC won’t have to deal with. If random luck drops me on a busy domain controller, it can take even longer to boot up.
Dead RAM?
I would seriously worry about viruses and worms.
Of course, Unix generally takes 15 minutes or so to boot, but you rarely reboot Unix.
Hi shelbo,
I registered just to reply to your question! I worked in an IT dept. for many years and we often saw the problem you described. Possibly your network has been configured to use what are called roaming profiles. Using roaming profiles results in your preferences and other options being saved to a server, instead of to your workstation. The purpose is to allow you to login to any workstation on the network and still get your preferred settings.
However, sometimes a roaming profile accumulates many unwanted and unnecessary files. These “bloated” profiles have to be downloaded from the server to the workstation. I’ve seen profiles sized 500 MB or greater. This situation causes the login to take a long time.
The only way for you to ascertain if this is what’s happened and to have it fixed is to contact whoever it is that provides you with help with computer problems in your company.
Hope this helps!
Petek
This is the problem. I just today changed a user’s 10 minute login to 30 seconds by giving them a new profile. Roaming profiles are a nice idea if you need them but they can be a bit buggy. Talk to your IT.
Running CCleaner has always helped me with bootup time…
I run it about once a week on my home computer.