PCs running Windows XP or Windows Vista take a long time to boot up. This is especially true if you use a Mac which seems to be responsive soon after its boots. I’ve used a variety of Windows PCs over the years. And, everything including the Dell Latitude D620 with a Core 2 Duo processor took many minutes from booting to being usable. In fact, the much older and less powerful Dell Dimension 2400 with a Celeron processor booted much faster and was usable much sooner than the Dell notebook. This was because the Dimension ran Windows XP while the D620 ran Windows Vista. And, the Dimension had a faster 7200rpm hard drive while the notebook had, if I recall correctly, a 5400rpm drive.
A third factor that messes up boot times are the various security and call-home-for-update processes that all fire at start-time. If you look at the processes running soon after boot (as soon as Ctrl-Alt-Del can actually work since it is stymied by the slow boot process too), you will see all kinds of junk apps calling home for updates while various security apps perform their tasks too.
This all leads to what for me is up to a 5 minute wait until my various Windows PCs are responsive and ready for actual work.
Tags: system boot
Don’t turn your computer off, put it into hibernate instead. Reboot only when the system requests it. See if that speeds things up.
KNN Foddr: Hibernation is good advice. However, the two PC’s I’ve run Vista on (a Dell Latitude D620 notebook and an eMachines T6420 both are very if-fy when I try to resume from hibernation. I would say that the D620 resumed 85% and behaved oddly about 25% of the time after it resumed. The T6420 resumes correctly about 10% of the time. So, I’ve stopped trying on that box.
Hibernation is all good but when your udating drivers and got to restart and every time and takes 5mins+ to load up
i just got a new HP laptop Pavilion 17″ – last couple weeks this thing has taken 15 minutes to reboot! i’ve tried everything to get it to move faster, other than running a recovery on it! Suggestions?
Vendors often ship a lot of “crapware” with new PCs. Check if HP placed any on yours that startup with Windows and disable them if you can do so safely. You should also check for malware that may be chewing up processing time. And, finally, you might want to consider a potential hardware problem. It may be that the hard drive has bad sectors or other physical problems.