I think a lot of people with HP laptops are having a similar problem but everytime i boot up, im faced with a blank screen for 3 minutes before everything loads. I found a video on youtube that shows exactly what is happening with my laptop also: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roThoqykpNQ any suggestions? Is it driver issues?

could you provide a little more information about the laptop, issue etc...?

Yes a little more information on the laptop would be nice. What are your startup items? If you dont know, go to start menu>run and type in "msconfig" without quotes. Go to the startup tab and post what is in there.

any external storage device attached to the machine?

Have you considered the link at the top of this subforum, titled "Trace Vista boot/shutdown/hibernate/standby/resume issues"?