Sloooooow Win 7 Boot Times... Need Help!

[Dark Shade]

No worries, just wondered... cool, so mobo is getting less likely... this is good... could the amount I have customized windows have any effect on start up time? Eg. I have a custom windows login screen background and a slideshow wallpaper. Would that lag it? I have a Norton Gadget, a LAN card monitor gadget, GFX temps gadget, an iTunes gadget and a daemon tools gadget. I also have about 5-7 sticky notes. Sometimes it is a LOT worse than others too, eg. I turned it on today and it took about 3 mins from the password screen and there was visible lag even in loading the desktop icons from getting to the taskbar (taskbar loaded, about 15 secs later the icons blinked into life), but yesterday it booted in about 1.5 mins total. IDK, seems kinda weird to me... Any ideas? I assume when people say drivers and BIOS, the manufacturer's (gigabyte) site will say the latest? How do I tell what BIOS rev I am running? I have to write myself a note to change SATA ports... xD

Edit: BTW, how do you like those M4's? I was considering picking one up, but IDK yet...

Thanks,
Dark Shade

 

[neo668]

How do I tell what BIOS rev I am running?

You can use CPU-Z. It'll look like this.

 

[irrykuxeh]

No worries, just wondered... cool, so mobo is getting less likely... this is good... could the amount I have customized windows have any effect on start up time? Eg. I have a custom windows login screen background and a slideshow wallpaper. Would that lag it? I have a Norton Gadget, a LAN card monitor gadget, GFX temps gadget, an iTunes gadget and a daemon tools gadget. I also have about 5-7 sticky notes. Sometimes it is a LOT worse than others too, eg. I turned it on today and it took about 3 mins from the password screen and there was visible lag even in loading the desktop icons from getting to the taskbar (taskbar loaded, about 15 secs later the icons blinked into life), but yesterday it booted in about 1.5 mins total.

Ya, that would kill your boot times lol. Try getting rid of all that stuff and booting again. Bet your times will be much better. (Buy an SSD and you can customize as much as you want with still awesome boot times.)

 

[shadowdr]

No worries, just wondered... cool, so mobo is getting less likely... this is good... could the amount I have customized windows have any effect on start up time? Eg. I have a custom windows login screen background and a slideshow wallpaper. Would that lag it? I have a Norton Gadget, a LAN card monitor gadget, GFX temps gadget, an iTunes gadget and a daemon tools gadget. I also have about 5-7 sticky notes. Sometimes it is a LOT worse than others too, eg. I turned it on today and it took about 3 mins from the password screen and there was visible lag even in loading the desktop icons from getting to the taskbar (taskbar loaded, about 15 secs later the icons blinked into life), but yesterday it booted in about 1.5 mins total. IDK, seems kinda weird to me... Any ideas? I assume when people say drivers and BIOS, the manufacturer's (gigabyte) site will say the latest? How do I tell what BIOS rev I am running? I have to write myself a note to change SATA ports... xD

Edit: BTW, how do you like those M4's? I was considering picking one up, but IDK yet...

Thanks,
Dark Shade

I would think that it would have a lot to do with it, not to mention the data size of the OS. With that much data on the OS drive I would think that fragmentation on that drive is terrible adding to the boot times.

IMHO, an SSD would be the single best thing that you could do for a noticable difference in speed and worth every penny. My M4's are awsome, I use two so that I can keep my OS install to a minimum and still have my games on the other. I find that working on a machine that has a mechanical drive to be an intolerable waste of time. I can't really say what my boot time is but it would be measured in seconds instead of minutes. Before I got my first SSD I had dual raid0 raptor arrays which I thought were pretty fast but the M4 blows them away in every singe aspect. Best spent money on my entire system.

 

[Dark Shade]

So to sum it all up, we have reached a tentative conclusion of saying that the amount of data and programs I have on my OS drive is what kills the computer's boot time over a longer span of time. This would be remedied by picking up a Crucial M4 128GB SSD. Correct? I was wondering if you noticed the lack of write speed though. The drive only hits 192MB/s (not that that is slow compared to mechanical though... xD) compared to the Corsair Force GT's score of 515MB/s. However, where I found the M4 and the GT (newegg.ca), the GT is $20 more so would I really notice the difference? Read speed is far more important right?

Thanks,
Dark Shade

 

[shadowdr]

I would say it is a pretty fair guess as long as it is not an unknown hardware issue like a bad sata cable. A full system defrag would probably help boot times for now but an OS drive with that much data will still fragment faster than one with less data and a data drive will not fragment at all without data being written to it.

I had an OCZ Vertex III before getting the M4's, the problem at that time was the Vertex was very unstable causing stuttering and BSODs where the drive would be lost after a reboot. The Vertex did have a faster feel but reliability was more important than the chance of loosing a bootable drive. I have not really kept up with the newer entries into the market since that time so any advice in that respect would be just a guess. I would spend some time looking over reviews and looking at the manufacturers forums to stay away from any problem drives. In the end any stable SATA III drive would be better than any mechanical one because of the seek times and not necessarily read or write times.

 

[irrykuxeh]

Honestly, any modern SSD would blow you away if you've never had one before. I have an OCZ Vertex 4 in my gaming computer and a Crucial M4 in another and they both work great, no problems. I recommend Intel and OCZ SSDs, but all of the Sandforce problems have been resolved for a while now, so any SATA III SSD will serve you well. Instead of fretting about that extra 50 MB/s read or write, just get what you can afford. That's my two cents anyway.

 

[Dark Shade]

Okay so on the topic of SSDs, how big is 64GB? Can I fit my os, photoshop, dreamweaver, corel, ms office, and a bit of other stuff on there? Is it worth the upgrade to 128GB? I am kinda leaning to a bit more and get a full 128 over the 64 just in case... or is 90 a good compromise? Opinions?

Thanks,
Dark Shade

 

[shadowdr]

I would go with the largest you can in your price range. One reason is that bigger is faster (within the same models), and you probably will have issues trimming down to a small drive. I went with a single 128 for my first drive and kept a lot of programs installed on a raptor, later on I got a second 128 and imaged my programs drive over to it, retiring the raptor. I have 40 gigs on each one now giving me plenty of room to grow and for wear leveling. I still like to go with the old school limit of having no more than 50% full on any drive, more on a mechanical drive would slow the drive down. This probably does not apply to SSD's but old habits die hard. I have had a very low failure rate on mech's because of it and expect the SSD's to last a very long time.