f1charlie

Andre thank you again for replying. I'm sorry for the delay, but I have been away. Should I run the Readyboot trainer again? This was from giveawayoftheday, so there is no support. Any idea what would cause that? Can these be speeded up? I don't use any network drives, so could these be disabled? This is just a front end to Vista firewall which allows more control over outgoing processes. I installed this to provide on demand scans, just in case something got through the anti-virus. However I have just tried to update the definitions and it would not work, so it is now uninstalled!

I have uploaded the new merged trace to the same Skydrive location. avguard.exe and svchost.exe seem to be the main processes causing disk usage. There are black areas on the Readyboot I/O graph which I believe is not good?

<timing bootDoneViaExplorer="40516" bootDoneViaPostBoot="120316" osLoaderDuration="1926" postBootRequiredIdleTime="10000" postBootDisturbance="69800" So booting to desktop has improved, but Windows is fully booted in 120s, which is worse , but at least I can actually use the computer while it is still booting!

I used the latest release driver 12.6 which seems to have a later date than the beta. How long should the driver take to load? That disk utilization graph is useful - a pity it doesn't appear as default! I am ahead of you with the AV. I tried reinstalling Avast as suggested elsewhere and while it was an improvement there was still a delay in the desktop appearing - so out with Avast and in with Avira. So far, it is not giving me the same irritation! Thanks Andre.

Thanks Andre. For the latest trace this is what I did: Scanned the disks - no errors Uninstalled Elby Clonedrive Uninstalled Catalyst Control Centre and installed only the video driver Disconnected USB drives Set Autologon The boot is much quicker, obviously due to the USB drives, as when they are connected I can hear them spin up and down during the BIOS boot and again during Windows loading, but the delay getting to a usable desktop is still there. Latest trace here: https://skydrive.live.com/#cid=E92D72B8036206DE&id=E92D72B8036206DE!112 Any further suggestions gratefully received! UPDATE; As you had identified Windows Search and Avast as taking a long time to start, I tried disabling each in turn. Disabling Windows Search made no discernible difference, but disabling Avast got rid of the horrible delay and sluggishness for those first few minutes after logging on. It seems some other Avast users have reported the same problem, so I guess I either wait for an update to Avast or try another AV program. Thanks for your help Andre and if you do have any other suggestions please let me know!

Thanks for the reply Andre. I guess there is nothing I can do about this? I assume I need the audio driver, but I will remove the Elby Clonedrive ( I can't remember why I installed it!). I only have the one Wacom tablet, and I guess I need those drivers, so there will be no time saving possible there. I will look to see if there are more recent drivers to see if this improves the time taken. BootExecute has the value 'autocheck autochk *'. Is that what you mean? For future traces I will use Sysinternals Autologon so that there will be no delay caused by me! However, there is something which is causing the heavy disk accessing which prevents reaching a useable desktop for several minutes. With your assistance I am starting to understand the trace slightly, but cannot see anything there which would explain this disk accessing. I don't use the ATI Control Centre, so I could look at uninstalling and installing only the driver. 11s I can put up with! It's the rest of the time that something is stopping me using the desktop that is the pain! Can this be identified with the boot trace or do I have to run something else?

It seems to be a bit quiet in here - perhaps Andre has fixed everyone's problems Perhaps Andre or another magician could help me out. I have run the Readyboot training which did speed up my boot to the Windows login page (although it still takes about 90 seconds), but I still have a delay after that during which the disk is constantly accessed for several minutes. This means I have to wait until this phase is over before logging in, or if I do log in, the desktop is pretty much unusable until the disc accessing has finished. I have run a boot trace which I have uploaded here (hope it works as I've never used this before): https://skydrive.live.com/?cid=E92D72B8036206DE&id=E92D72B8036206DE!112