start & shutdown zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

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garrygun

New Member
My pc takes long time switching on, even l o n g e r shutting down.
is there something wrong or do i need to resest something?
any help appreciated,
cheers, Garry.
 
slow hard drive.. disk cleanup, clear cookies, files, offline files, favorites, and history. delete unwanted programs, then defrag. that should speed things up a bit...


or upgreade your cpu
 
Do you have any external devices like a printer plugged in? Sometimes a defect in a printer or other device connected will slow the startup. For slow shutdowns the amount of programs remiaing active in the background would need a look. One fast way is to look at the running processes seen in the task manager. Simply right click on the Start menu bar to select that from the right click menu or press the ctrl-alt-del keys then open the processes tab.
 
is it vista? thats slow as F*CK to shut down.
because all my computers are rather crap, just flip the ol switch if you get bored of waiting.
 
It can take a long time with XP as well if any program or services is hanging for shutting a system down. It sounds more like a long list or some app tying up the works more then anything since this is seen at startup as well as shutdown. Besides any devices attached one way to get things moving is to reduce the number of things that are loading along with Windows at startup. That's why there's an msconfig utility included in Windows for "selective startup".
 
I would give a big word of caution for the less pc knowledgable there. At least with the msconfig you can easily avoid any essential background services needed for Windows to run by checking off the "hide all microsoft services" box before toying around in the services section. This tool leaves everything wide open where unchecking the wrong items can leave you in... :eek: Limbooooooo....! crash!
 
The full version of Ad-Aware 2007 will out on june 4th for the professional version. One program that works well and catches what Ad-Aware misses happens to be Spyware Terminator. http://www.spywareterminator.com/

Besides sweeping the drive for "uninvited pests" a look at unnecessary startups perhaps evem a bad install of a program with crosslinks to system files is one other thing to look at as well. The system file checker is a good tool for finding and correcting glitches there. You simply type "sfc /scannow" in at the Run prompt with the Windows cd in the drive to start that going. It will often repair or replace anything found damaged or missing.
 
I would recommend downloading hijackthis and posting the results on the hijackthis thread. Chances are you have some of the more obnoxious apps running, like yahoo messenger, which always make your system slower on startup and shutdown. A good system cleanup, using something like ccleaner, then defragging your registry and your hdd will also help. Adding memory also speeds things up and is the easiest of all the upgrades to any system. Adding an AV program and/or anti-spyware will actually make it slower if the problem isn't viruses or spyware. Most of the time a gradual slowdown is indicative of a bloated, fragmented registry, and defragmenting your HDD does absolutely nothing to change it.
 
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The system registry doesn't get fragmented but the hard drive will over a period of time. The reigistry accumilates "orphans" from softwares installed and later removed where loose values are left behind. Reducing the amount of startups and running a good registry cleaner as well as analyzing just how fragmented the drive has become would be a better recommendation there.
 
For lack of a better word I call the empty spaces and useless registry entries left behind when files and apps are deleted or uninstalled fragmentation. Didn't mean to cause any confusion or mislead anyone
 
The better term for registry loaded up with a bunch of now useless entries would be "cluttered" there. Fragmentation has more to do with pieces of files being scattered around a drive. But it usually takes some time before a drive sees a high enough fragmentation level for Windows to fail while it will still run slower with only some 15-20% total. Most drives will see about 3-5% on average where a quick defrag witll clean that right up.

A utility like HiJack This or SmitFraud that shows new startups is pointless for getting into the registry far enough to find useless entries still trying to load drivers that may or may not be still on the drive. The common problem there is seen from uninstallers are not that thorough at cleaning things up. A good freeware that runs on all versions of Windows from 95 and NT up is RegCleaner that doesn't create any of it's own entries when installed.
 
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