doveman

OK, he's done that now with a laptop running alongside his PC and there were only dropouts on the PC. So any ideas what he can try next?

Yep, mine is the X4 and my brother's is Ste-PC.

Yeah, I think it improved a bit after that, down to about 140-170s. I recently set some third-party services (MCEBuddy, MPExtended/WebMediaPortal) to Automatic (Delayed) and that helps avoid the boot getting too bogged down but something I found was that there's a problem with HwInfo's auto-start, which creates a Task in Task Scheduler to start and this begins quite soon after Windows boots but then doesn't progress and shows the same thing on screen for ages, until everything else has loaded I think and then it finishes loading. By disabling this Task and just running it from Start Menu - Start, it seems to have reduced my boot time from around 140s to 110s

Thanks, that's a good idea. I'll get him to plug a laptop into the same port on the router to determine whether it's the PC or something else that's the problem.

Ste-PC.zip contains the one from Ste-PC and X4.zip contains the one from X4

Hi Another useful tool to add to the arsenal I've PM'd the links to you as requested. I rebooted the X4 PC and managed to get it down to 1952MB with most apps shutdown, which is 767MB better but still the other PC would only be 1610MB without the RAMDisk and that's with a bunch of apps running. RAMMap uses about 600MB just when loaded (increases to about 1GB when making the dump), so that pushes it up to 2570MB Here's the Ste-PC with RAMMap running

I noticed this system I'm setting up for my brother is only using 2610MB and as it has a 1GB DataRAM RAMDisk loaded, that means Windows 7 x64 Ultimate (plus the programs I left running) are only using 1.5GB. Yet my own system, which doesn't have a RAMDisk loaded, is using 2719MB with much less programs running. The main difference between the systems is my brother's is using the onboard HD4250, utilisiing 512MB of system RAM (this is taken out of the equation before the RAM usage shown), whereas mine has a 2GB HD6950. Would this make my system use over 1GB more RAM?

That probably would have been a good idea at the time but I don't have a note of what time it happened unfortunately. It's mostly only Windows tasks in there anyway, except for Avast! Emergency Update, Comodo Update and GoogleUpdateTasks but I've disabled the latter anyway and they last ran on 26/08. None have "Wake the computer to run this task" enabled anyway. The only task I can see that ran anywhere near the time before I started this thread is Comodo Update at 20:35 but as I say, that's not set to wake the computer.

Yeah, it seems strange as I'd expect the NIC or my PCI TV tuner to be able to wake it but I think they're normally properly identified by lastwake, as is the mouse or keyboard (or at least it says USB device), so I'm not sure what this could have been.

My PC just woke and powercfg /lastwake shows Wake History Count - 1 Wake History [0] Wake Source Count - 1 Wake Source [0] Type: Device Instance Path: PCI\VEN_1022&DEV_9608&SUBSYS_96011849&REV_00\3&267a616a&0&48 Friendly Name: Description: PCI standard PCI-to-PCI bridge Manufacturer: (Standard system devices) which is apparently an AMD device. Does anyone know why this would wake my PC, as I obviously don't want it waking randomly for no good reason?

My Dad's having a rather annoying problem with his PC, where Internet radio streams keep dropping out on him. He says he's tested with audio files on the PC and hasn't noticed the problem with those, so it seems to be limited to Internet/streaming. He's checked there isn't a latency problem with DPC Latency and I've been running the streaming in Iron Portable this afternoon to eliminate it being a IE10 problem. He says it happens with various Internet stations (LBC, UCBMedia) which seems to rule out a particular source being the problem. I tried shutting down a load of programs and services and it seemed to stop when I killed hdparm (which I was using to disable APM at boot to prevent the annoying chirping sound from the secondary Seagate HDD http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Desktop-HDD-Desktop-SSHD/2TB-ST2000DM001-3TB-STBD3000100-Barracudas-Making-Weird-quot/m-p/185414#M30716 ) but after logging out and back in again, it's been happening again so maybe it was a culmination of things I killed that helped or maybe it was just a coincidence. Wierdly, it was running fine for a while until my Dad walked into the room but the PC is wired, not wireless and the wireless is only used to link with a router downstairs connected to his Smart TV (and occasionally for my Android phone when I'm over). I'm out of my depth here really as I've no idea how to troubleshoot this and find out where the interruption is happening, so if anyone could help that would be great.

I'm having a very annoying problem with standby on this PC, where sometime it goes to standby after xmins as it should and other times it doesn't and when I check the only thing that seems to be preventing it is \FileSystem\srvnet but as you can see from the below, I've set a requestsoverride for that so it shouldn't be. I've also disabled "Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service" and I'm not using Homegroups so have disabled "HomeGroup Listener" and "HomeGroup Provider" as well. I've also enabled the "Allow Sleep with Remote Opens" setting in Power Options. I've seen several threads about this problem >powercfg -requestsoverride[SERVICE][PROCESS][DRIVER]\FileSystem\srvnet SYSTEMThis one suggests setting Media Streaming to Block All under Control Panel\Network and Internet\Network and Sharing Center\Advanced sharing settings but that's disabled by disabling the WMP Network Sharing Service already. I tried enabling that service, so that I could set this to Block All and then disabling the service again though. http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/bce158e2-d057-4761-b715-5f68b8002fc2/not-sleeping-due-to-filesystemsrvnet This suggests setting the requestsoveride, which I've already done http://forums.windowsforum.org/index.php?showtopic=46205 I did try using this workaround and letting Mediaportal's PS++ control the standby but I'd rather get it working properly and let Windows handle it (and I think I ran into some other issues using this method anyway) http://forum.team-mediaportal.com/threads/powerscheduler-1-4-0-x-stable-versions-for-mediaportal-1-4.95463/page-99#post-1013984

It's what IE said needed to be enabled when I tried to open Windows Update Catalog. I managed to install the Rollup by clicking on the msu file instead of the .exe. I updated the BIOS to fix a fan-speed issue (that was the only change from the existing BIOS) and had a BSOD after booting and launching IE in Sandboxie but it hasn't reoccured. The PC has been acting a bit weird since though, a bit sluggish and video stuttering, so perhaps the Rollup wasn't a good idea. I was able to run the six boot sequence without getting that error anymore though, although that might have been due to clearing out the temp files rather than installing the Rollup.

Hmm, I can't. It tells me I need to enable userdata persistence but I already have that enabled! EDIT: Nevermind. Cleaned out my internet and temp files with CCleaner and MS Update Catalog started working after that. Downloaded the Rollup but haven't managed to get it to run yet but I'll try again after a reboot.

OK I'll try. It was working fine until recently though so I don't understand.

Not myself but I'll double-check that they're still enabled and something hasn't automatically disabled them. If they were disabled would Rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks create a layout.ini though? EDIT: OK, checked the registry and they're both still set to 3 and Superfetch shows as running in services.msc

Managed to fix it by booting the VHD from the Win 7 Boot Menu and using BootICE to fix the BCD on the VHD. Happily booting it from grub4dos now

Hmm, I can't run it anymore as it throws up a "Gave up waiting for Win7RTM....", after the first reboot I think (I wasn't watching it). I googled this and it's because Windows\Prefetch\ doesn't contain a layout.ini file but I used Rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks to create one and then did defrag c: -boot before trying again but I got the same error and layout.ini has disappeared again! EDIT: Cleared out Windows\Prefetch\ and tried again. It does seem to be doing several reboots, so maybe the error only comes after the last one. I can see "Stopping Trace" in the background, behind the error "Gave up waiting for Win7RTM physical prefetcher after 300 seconds. Could not wait for prefetcher" and again the layout.ini has gone AWOL.

By "normal" I just meant the way it boots, i.e. from the Win7 Boot menu using the Win7 VHD driver. It's actually a Win 7 Portable build, that was made from a Win 7 Full VHD (i.e. Windows was installed into the VHD), so I guess maybe making the Portable build stripped out bootmgr and \Boot but maybe they were never there. I could check the Win 7 Full VHD to see but I've just turned off the PC containing it, so I'll do that later. My G4D entry is: title Win7 x32 VHD (Backup, Winvblock) find --set-root /VHD/Win7x86_Port.vhd map --mem /VHD/Win7x86_Port.vhd (hd0) map --hook root (hd0,0) chainloader /bootmgr I thought it was a bit strange that the BCD entry contained the path to the VHD but I thought I had to select G: (the partition that Windows had given the attached VHD) when creating the new entry, as I thought there are probably some identifiers on the drive which the boot manager uses to create the entry. I tried just selecting C: instead and creating the entry which gave Windows Boot Manager -------------------- identifier {9dea862c-5cdd-4e70-acc1-f32b344d4795} device boot description Windows Boot Manager locale en-US inherit {7ea2e1ac-2e61-4728-aaa3-896d9d0a9f0e} default {c1f4b8eb-003a-11e3-b600-bc5ff40da1b3} resumeobject {1f8184a2-14de-11df-9734-f08c6d8c50b0} displayorder {c1f4b8eb-003a-11e3-b600-bc5ff40da1b3} toolsdisplayorder {b2721d73-1db4-4c62-bf78-c548a880142d} timeout 10 Windows Boot Loader ------------------- identifier {c1f4b8eb-003a-11e3-b600-bc5ff40da1b3} device partition=C: path \Windows\system32\winload.exe description Microsoft Windows 7 locale en-US osdevice partition=C: systemroot \Windows but that failed to boot with the same error. I can boot the VHD from the Win 7 Boot Menu and then it will be mounted as C: and create the entry again. The only reason I was using my normal Windows install rather than the VHD is because EasyBCD isn't installed in it and it requires .NET or something and I was trying to avoid installing much into it. I can use BootICE but I didn't have much luck with that either but I'll try again. I don't think I've got another working PE to use (I've got one but it doesn't boot on all my machines, due to missing drivers I guess even though I created it with a load installed, so I'm not sure if it boots on this one or not) but that would mount itself as C: anyway, so I wouldn't be able to mount the VHD as C: in that.

I'm trying to convert a normal Win7 x86 VHD into a Winvblock RAMDisk one to boot from grub4dos. I booted into the VHD and installed WinvBlock, which didn't show any errors. I found there was no bootmgr or Boot\ folder on the VHD so I copied those across from my HDD, except the BCD file which was locked, so I created a new one with BootICE. That wouldn't boot though, so I tried doing a Reset BCD Config with EasyBCD and then creating a new entry. However, it still doesn't boot, giving status 0xc000000e on windows\system32\winload.exe . I thought that file might be missing, as bootmgr and the \Boot files were but I checked and it's there. In EasyBCD's verbose/debug view, my BCD looks like this:

Well I did some more tests. Starting with a boot time of 72s 0. Disabled Services: dnscrypt-proxy, MCEBuddy, NFS Server, No-IP DUC, SunRPC Portmap Daemon, TV Service - 67s 1. Disabled Classic Shell, LP Installer: 50s 2. Re-enabled Classic Shell - 56s 3. Re-enabled LP Installer: 52s 4. Re-enabled Services: dnscrypt-proxy, NFS Server, No-IP DUC, SunRPC Portmap Daemon - 52s 5. Re-enabled MCEBuddy - 62s 6. Disabled MCE Buddy, enabled DVDFab Passkey, Jitsi, Peerblock - 74s 7. Installed Avira Antivir - 140s 8. Ran verboseReadyBoot again - 130s The numbers correspond to the summaries and zipped ETLs I've uploaded here: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B1fDI89phEESMGdyUTl3a2pIaEU&usp=sharing Clearly Avira Antivir is a big problem, so I might try uninstalling that and installing Avast again, as I did record a boot with that installed of only 53s. EDIT: Yep, with Avast instead, after doing verboseReadyBoot again it's back down to 90s, which is reasonable. It's going to go up when I re-enable TVService and MPExtended but they just take a long while to start and it can't be helped, so I think this is about as good as I can expect.

Ah, well they're running as services, hence my confusion Anyway, I looked at the xml and as far as I can tell, none of those are taking a long time to load but I don't pretend to understand how to interpret the summary properly so maybe I've misunderstood something. Does it show that any of those are causing delays?

As I've said before, I have barely anything running at startup, so that can't be the issue.

I moved my HDD to a SATAIII port to see if that would help. I also disabled the TVService to test but strangely, I had a boot of 67s before doing this, then the next boot it was 84s and then 72s. I've uploaded the traces for both (with TVService is _1.zip, without is _2.zip) along with the extracted summaries, if you take a look and see how they compare to previously please. boot_BASE+CSWITCH+POWER_1.zip https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B1fDI89phEESOC1hVklTRVg1bFk/edit?usp=sharing summary_boot (TVService).xml https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B1fDI89phEESNmc1QzVQN0daVGM/edit?usp=sharing boot_BASE+CSWITCH+POWER_2.zip https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B1fDI89phEESRU91RHhWZE5IWGs/edit?usp=sharing summary_boot2 (No TVService).xml https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B1fDI89phEESNmJsR1FaeldKY0E/edit?usp=sharing

Sure but it's the same disk that booted in 43s before and people have been booting from HDD for ages before SSD became popular and we were able to minimise boot times still, so I don't think the fact I'm using a HDD is the problem. I'll check it with the TVservice disabled though to see how much that's adding and try the performance updates (after making a backup) although they're quite old aren't they, from 2011, so you'd think if they were that important they'd have been included in Windows Update by now.