evenin' all;
My nice shiny 6 month old Lenovo Z570 is being a bad boy. In recent weeks I'd noticed the boot time seemed longer (HDD flashing for a minute plus) ; so I used the useful link here:-
www.techrepublic.com/blog/window-on-windows/use-windows-7-event-viewer-to-track-down-issues-that-cause-slower-boot-times/3253
to set up Event Viewer custom views, and looked at the boot times in the log. Up to and including 14th June pretty much every boot was a minute; on 20th June and thereafter typical boot is 2 minutes plus.
Did a system restore to 13 th June, still the same, so decided it was a HW fault - ran Windows Experience thingy and Passmark, both showed the HDD read/write speeds were normal.
Random Googling produced three vaguely possibly Hotfixes, so downloaded and installed KB2505454, KB2510636 and KB2555428. Also found a thread somewhere that suggested deleting the contents of WindowsPrefetch would do the trick, but no.
Anyone any other ideas please?
For those into such things I've posted a comparison of pre and post problem boot logs here:-
picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/bG-y85_ZHyWfddqvqSlg0-kgSTgGrXzILFrcgTvx9pY?feat=directlink
Last edited by: R.P. on Fri 6 Jul 12 at 22:02
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Until someone who knows what they're talking about comes along, that BootPrefetchBytes looks interesting - has something (prefetch) been disabled? Any clues in the BIOS?
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I'm running MSE, although i've also done a virus check with Malwarebytes.
I haven't deliberately disabled prefetch - the 0 entry did strike me as odd - will see if anything unusual in the BIOS.
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not thinking of a virus, I am thinking the AV is slowing it down. Take MSE off and put on a nice fresh copy of Avast, and see what happens.
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Oh, and what services and applications are you loading at startup?
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Spybot S/D has a very good start-up manager , Advanced mode, tools, system start-up. if you click the double arrow on the right of the pane, a descriptor will open telling you if the entry is needed or not! Surprising what is starting in the background that is un needed and can be disabled by unchecking its box.
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just noticed your using MSE, the hdd flashing at bootup could be that going online and checking for updates, its not the sharpest updater about!. Try looking in task manager processes to see if you can spot what is using cpu/memory.
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I have the excellent Z370 (same thing but 13.3") which has given me sterling service.
If yours is only 6 months old, why don't you contact their technical support:
support.lenovo.com/en_GB/feedback/contactsupport.page?
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You need to download a program called process explorer, it will tell you exactly what is going on in the background.
If there is not much activity and it is still slow, I would test the hard drive.
Most likely to be just a buggy service running in the background, process explorer should help you find it.
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Just fire up Task Manager to look at what is using the CPU.
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I like process explorer because it shows you everything that is going on at once, but task manager is ok if the resource hog is obvious.
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OK .....back to computer says no after a day tyre licking old bangers for Spamette Major :-/
devonite: I've now tried a clean boot i.e. all startup items and non MS processes disabled via MSCONFIG, made no difference :-/. I'm still suspicious of Windows Update though, must find a way of killing that.
Dog: funnily enough it hadn't occurred to me to actually contact Lenovo support, I'll try that if I can't fix it today.
Zero: tried Avast, much the same
Rattle/rtj70: once the boot has actually completed then the machine runs fine, task mangler shows 0% CPU and 20% memory utilisation when it's just sitting there. From the boot log then "BootSmssInitTime" and "BootPostBootTime" are both taking around a minute longer than normal, which accounts for pretty much all the delay.
Thanks anyway chaps.
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>> disabled via MSCONFIG, made no difference :-/. I'm still suspicious of Windows Update though, must
>> find a way of killing that.
Yeah worth a sniff, it can cause abnormal wait times. You can stop it from control panel and reboot
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>> Dog: funnily enough it hadn't occurred to me to actually contact Lenovo support, I'll try
>> that if I can't fix it today.
lenovo support will tell you to do a restore from the hidden partition, and then ask you if its still slow. It won't be after the rebuild of course.
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>> >> Dog: funnily enough it hadn't occurred to me to actually contact Lenovo support, I'll
>> try
>> >> that if I can't fix it today.
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>> lenovo support will tell you to do a restore from the hidden partition, and then
>> ask you if its still slow. It won't be after the rebuild of course.
>>
I'm not sure that'll work as I've re-partitioned the HDD, although I am starting to move data off this machine onto others, in case it does get to "slash and burn". The 'hidden' recovery partition is 27GB which is a bit greedy.
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>> OK .....back to computer says no after a day tyre licking old bangers for Spamette
>> Major
Hope they were tasty ;-)
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>> >> OK .....back to computer says no after a day tyre licking old bangers for
>> Spamette
>> >> Major
>> Hope they were tasty ;-)
>>
only 1 letter out :-). The 'high'light was a Polo with bald fronts and barely legal rears. Decided not to bother test driving that one.
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After trying the above with no obvious solution have you tried a Monthly System defrag using something like MyDefrag on the C drive?
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Does it reach the Windows screen quickly then go slow or ius the delay before then? Haven't got something plugged into USB have you? Or a non-existent disk or somesuch configured in BIOS, which is is waiting for?
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It gets to the black screen with the 4 colour flag/window logo quickly, then the screen goes blank for around 60 secs. while the HDD light flashes a lot, then I get the normal blue background and my desktop comes up in a few secs after that.
Nothing plugged into USB
I'll work out how to get into the BIOS.
Cheers.
what's particularly baffling is why didn't a system restore to before the problem fix it (pointing to a HDD HW problem), yet any HDD tests show read/write speeds are fine.
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>> After trying the above with no obvious solution have you tried a Monthly System defrag
>> using something like MyDefrag on the C drive?
>>
Just tried that..no better! thanks anyway.
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I AM A MUPPET
Problem fixed; smokie was almost spot on. No USB devices connected; but what I thought was the usual black plastic blanking plate in the SD card slot was actually an 8GB SDHC card.
Removed card and hey presto boot back to 60 secs!
Thanks to everyone for taking the time to reply.
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:-) Guess it was trying to boot from it then, then not finding a boot sector so moving onto the next drive? You can probably change the boot order in the BIOS to avoid that,. although I have a removable FDD which always barges into the first boot slot no matter how I configure it.
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It wasn't booting from it as it had started to load Windows 7 from what was said above. It obviously didn't like booting with this inserted.
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Re Windows Update. If you configure it to Advise you of available updates but allow you to choose which will be installed, it may help.
By the way, I've used Avast! for many years (it's brilliant), but if it updates when you first switch on, being able to use the machine takes a minute or so until the definitions updates have been downloaded.
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It was scanning the card/drive, after it booted from windows. And being a USB drive it was slow to scan.
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Win 7 laptop - slow boot - running out of ideas - Focusless
