Windows Vista slow startup. Any tips for diagnosis?

Factual Questions
1

My vista seems to take a geological amount of time to finish booting up (i.e. get to a point some time after the desktop and start menu have appeared, where nothing is still loading in the background)

Once it’s got there, I look at the processes in task manager, and the AVG process has taken 23 seconds, and the system process slightly longer. Should AVG be using up that amount of time to boot up?

I’ve turned on boot logging, but that’s completely useless as it just tells me what it loaded, with no timestamps.

I see there’s an option for no gui, and an option that shows the drivers it’s loading in real time. But whenever I’ve seen windows do that it takes even longer.

Would it be beneficial to turn that on, and just look for the biggest pauses to get an idea what drivers are taking the longest to load, and go from there?

I’d like to diagnose this without using any third-party software. I am generally suspicious of most third-party stuff (the internet is saturated with the crap).
I have selective boot already on (to not load a selection of crappy TSRs I don’t need)

I don’t load the resource-hog that is the sidebar.

I have UAC turned off.

I have indexing turned off.
Oh and I have a plenty powerful PC with plenty fast HD and RAM.

(Intel Quad core 2.4ghz. 8gb 1066 ram running at 800mhz (mobo won’t support 8 running at 1066), modern, recent, fast Seagate and WD hard disks)

Any suggestions?

2

Snapfiles is an excellent source free and for pay programs and your safe to download from there.

Look at the settings for AVG. I find that when I have the email scanner and the link scanner AVG slows my computer to a crawl 'cause everytime it’s constantly looking through all the email and will check every single link on a webpage before it lets me view it. Obviously that can take a long time. So disable link scanner and email scanner on AVG

When you look at your task manager make sure you’ve pressed the “show processes from all users”

I have windows sidebar and that loads fast as anything, so unless you got a lot of gadgets you made or put on, that should not be an issue.

Did you load your comptuer in “Safe Mode,” and see how quick it goes?

Indexing doesn’t matter, once the computer is indexed it adds to it and subtracts from it, and it takes a HUGE amount of time originally but once you have it over with, it shouldn’t hurt anything.

UAC doens’t matter either.

My computer has what you have basically and goes very fast.

Did you try Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware? The free version is excellent.

Do you mave MS Office? I found that some of the setting in MS Office can really slow you down. It’s not Office that is the issue, it’s the setting. It’s looking for updates/

Assuming you’re virus free, I would say it’s probably setting in the programs and not the programs themselves that are slowing you down.

For instance many programs are automatically set to look for latest updates everytime you reboot. So you can have 20 programs looking for updates as soon as you boot up.

Once your computer loads up, despite the time, does it run OK?

Go to Windows Defender -> Tools -> Software explorer -> Category (Drop down box) -> Startup programs. (Remember to press “SHOW ALL USERS” at the bottom" for a complete list)

Finally many programs have “auto-synch.” As soon as you boot up it looks for changes to make sure your software is still in synch with your files.

3

I have a slower system than you but Vista boots fairly fast for me. It did boot slow after installing SP1, but it sped up again after I installed SP2.

4

No it shouldn’t. What scans do you have it set to do on startup? Do you have it set to check for updates?

BTW I went off AVG a while back and now use Avast.

5

My AVG doesn’t do any automatic scanning (i.e. no scheduled system scan). It does do email and link scanning but only when I’m browsing or in outlook.

It does check for updates.

AVG seems popular. What’s better about Avast? Is it free?

6

Native 64 bit version, and it’s free.