Help lower my horrid boot time!

WeaponX6X · Jul 14, 2006

I have an Acer Ferrari 4006 WLMi. I bought it a few months ago...and for whatever reason the boot time is already horribly high. Booting to the Windows Logon screen is quick enough. However, it takes over a minute from the time I click on my log on name until I can actually do something. The computer seems to spend about 30 seconds doing nothing. I have even tried disabling everything in msconfig except for ctfmon and it still takes forever to boot. I don't get it.

I'm running Avast! and my OS is WinXP x64. Any ideas of what to try?

klingens · Jul 14, 2006

Remove the garbage in your startup items.

Note: not just the startup folder. there are about a dozen registry palces where windows looks for startup items. Use autoruns from sysinternals.com

UnseenMenace · Jul 14, 2006

By default the Acer Ferrari models unfortunately do not perform like the name sake but more like a product from the parent company fiat because they ship with a 5,400rpm hard disk with near on no cache worth mentioning.
The hard disks are a bad performers in itself, changing the hard disk helps performance greatly as does removing all the pointless 'acer' bundled software such as eManager, GridVista, Launch Manager.
I did this on both my acer laptops and get reasonable performance out of them now.

WeaponX6X · Jul 15, 2006

Thanks for the replies

klingens said:
Remove the garbage in your startup items.

Note: not just the startup folder. there are about a dozen registry palces where windows looks for startup items. Use autoruns from sysinternals.com

hmm well I all but unchecked everything through MSConfig.

I dled Autoruns and holy **** that's a lot of stuff. I don't know what most of them are...I disabled only some printer software and MSN Messenger. What else should I look for? Everything else looks like M$ stuff. I tried hiding Microsoft Entires but it doesn't seem to be working?

UnseenMenace said:
By default the Acer Ferrari models unfortunately do not perform like the name sake but more like a product from the parent company fiat because they ship with a 5,400rpm hard disk with near on no cache worth mentioning.
The hard disks are a bad performers in itself, changing the hard disk helps performance greatly as does removing all the pointless 'acer' bundled software such as eManager, GridVista, Launch Manager.
I did this on both my acer laptops and get reasonable performance out of them now.

I have been a little dissapointed with my Ferrari so far. Notably the absolutely horrid viewing angle. I figure they opted for a slower hard drive to increase battery life. I'm not sure if I plan to keep this laptop for more than another year and half...but what HD would you recommend I install instead? I could use more space as I'm almost maxed out.

I also love Acer's GridVista. It's quite useful for my job as I constantly need several screens open at once. I'm not quite sure what the other two programs do however

TollhouseFrank · Jul 15, 2006

try TuneXP. it helped lower my boot time from 2 minutes to about 30 seconds.

WeaponX6X · Jul 15, 2006

I've tried TuneXP on one of my other computers and it didn't help me at all. I've also read about people where it increased their boot time so I'm a bit hesitant.

Do you happen to know exactly what I should and should select in TuneXP?

UnseenMenace · Jul 16, 2006

ive got a 7200rpm 160gb drive in my acer and it helped its performance greatly without effecting the battery life to any major degree.
My acers had XP installed as FAT32 for some reason, reinstalling the OS using NTFS without the acer tweaks helps a great deal also.

habbajabba · Jul 16, 2006

XP on fat32? really?
SIW.exe (task mgr replacement -free) will show all running processes & tell you where the actual files are as well. NTREGOPT & Bootvis (free) are also very good for optimizing boot. Most importantly uninstall/remove frome startup all bs. More ram may help too. Tunexp is dated, don't bother

WeaponX6X · Jul 16, 2006

Yeah...if you want to see my rant about Acer's flagship laptops coming with Fat32...read on.

I've already converted my file system to NTFS. Thankfully, you don't have to format to do so.

AngelfireUk83 · Jul 16, 2006

I bought a Asus Laptop 2 weeks ago the Asus AMD Athlon Turion64 MT32 http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/Asus_Notebooks.html 2nd from top. Anyways I took out the 4,200RPM HDD and replaced it with a Hitachi Travelstar 100gb 7,200RPM 8mb cache HDD & it's miles miles better.

I also switched the crappy 512mb PC2700 memory and replaced it with 1GB (2x 512mb) Kingston SODIMM 512MB PC3200 memory. I also installed Windows XP Pro as I use it on my PC what I'm on now (sig) & I'm not keen on Home Edition weird. Pitty I can't upgrade the graphics but I mainly use it for my DJ-ing job on weekends.

WeaponX6X · Jul 17, 2006

Would swapping out my hard drive void my warranty? I would imagine so...

johan851 · Jul 17, 2006

I've already converted my file system to NTFS. Thankfully, you don't have to format to do so.

I've had problems doing that myself...that might not be helping.

Swapping out a hard drive might technically void the warranty, but that's a situation where you're 1) certainly not going to break anything, and 2) can easily put the old hard drive in if something goes wrong with the rest of the machine down the road.

I say give reinstalling Windows a try before anything else.

UnseenMenace · Jul 17, 2006

WeaponX6X said:
Would swapping out my hard drive void my warranty? I would imagine so...

One of my acer 1522WLMAi (3000+ AMD 64) was sent back under warrenty to acer as the screen flicked on and off at random after I dropped it again (I do this often) this laptop had a different hard disk, more memory and was running ubuntu Linux.... it was repaired without issue, however upon return I was notified that they would not offer warentee services on parts not supplied by acer.. Email your local acer importer for information regarding this if your concerned, it does not hurt to ask them

benbaked · Jul 17, 2006

i suggest replacing winxp x64 edition with regular xp if possible. my opteron would usually sit on the splash screen rapidly blinking the hard drive access light for about two minutes while making hardly any noise...then suddenly after a couple of minutes of that it would finish booting. the issue never occurred for me on regular winxp.

WeaponX6X · Jul 17, 2006

I did plan to dual boot as WinXP x64 is a bit annoying when it comes to compatibility.

Tebore · Jul 17, 2006

There's a trick to using TuneXP. You have to clear the prefetch out completely yourself. Have a good defrag software like diskkeeper.

Defrag>TuneXP>"Ultra-Fast Boot Option"> Defrag > restart.
Follow that order and you'll notice it.

WeaponX6X · Jul 18, 2006

Thanks for the tip. What do you recommend I defrag with? Is M$'s defragger good enough?

WeaponX6X · Jul 18, 2006

I tried defragging, running TuneXP and the Ultra Fast Boot Option, defragging again, and restarting. It does seem a good bit faster. But I'm still not satiated. haha. Is it unreasonable to expect my desktop to be within 15 seconds of clicking my login name?

redduc900 · Jul 18, 2006

Possibly post a screenshot of all your running processes, and also under the Startup tab of the System Configuration Utility... with all of the entries in both visible.

Start | Run | Type msconfig, and click OK | Under the "Boot.ini" tab of the System Configuration Utility, put a check next to /BOOTLOG and click OK | On next reboot a file called Ntbtlog.txt will be created in the Windows directory. The log file may be able to help lead you in a direction in which to look regarding your slow boot problem. This is only used for troubleshooting, as the generated log file will keep increasing in size after each subsequent reboot... so make sure to uncheck the /BOOTLOG switch after you determine you don't need to continue logging.

The following MSKB articles may also be of some help to you...

How to troubleshoot by using the System Configuration utility in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=310560

How to perform advanced clean-boot troubleshooting in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=316434

WeaponX6X · Jul 18, 2006

I will try that when I get home.

I think this has a lot to do with Avast!. Whenever I converted from FAT32 to NTFS, Avast! ****ed up and I had to reinstall it. I downloaded a remover as I was not able to remove Avast! using the traditional add/remove programs route. I'm pretty sure my high boot time started because of that. Any thoughts?

Thanks for all the help guys. I love this forum for a reason.

Help lower my horrid boot time!

Member

Member

UnseenModerator

Member

Senior Headphone Guru

Member

UnseenModerator

Member

Member

Member

Member

Insatiably Malcontent, Senior Member

UnseenModerator

Folding/SETI/Rosetta Team Member

Member

Member

Member

Member

Inactive Moderator

Member

Similar threads