[MagicAndre1981]

Your Windows takes extremely long to boot:

<timing bootDoneViaExplorer="323656" bootDoneViaPostBoot="345356" 

this is 5min and 23s to only boot to the desktop!

The first delay is the PreSMSS phase.

 <interval name="PreSMSS" startTime="0" endTime="59993" duration="59993">

this takes nearly 50s.I can see that the enumeration of the IDE devices takes some time. Next starting some drivers takes a long time (6.7s for the HD Audio driver and Elby Clonedrive takes over 3s). The next big issue is that all your Wacom devices need each time 3s the enum and 3s to start.

This sums up to 50s.

Next delay happens in SMSS Init.

I can see that the smss:BootExecuteList starts at 60s and ends at 80 seconds.

So open regedit and go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager and look at the value BootExecute .

Which programs are started there?

Now WinlogonInit causes the longest delay:

<interval name="WinlogonInit" startTime="89076" endTime="305907" duration="216831">

Here RequestCredentials takes most time. So enter your password faster.

And finally starting all tools at login takes 11s. You can try to Disable the ATI Control Center and use other tools like ATI Tray Tools or MSI Afterburner. The ATI/AMD tools is coded in .Net and such apps can start slowly.

[f1charlie]

Thanks for the reply Andre.

MagicAndre1981, on 09 August 2012 - 02:26 PM, said:

this takes nearly 50s.I can see that the enumeration of the IDE devices takes some time.

I guess there is nothing I can do about this?

MagicAndre1981, on 09 August 2012 - 02:26 PM, said:

Next starting some drivers takes a long time (6.7s for the HD Audio driver and Elby Clonedrive takes over 3s). The next big issue is that all your Wacom devices need each time 3s the enum and 3s to start.

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.

MagicAndre1981, on 09 August 2012 - 02:26 PM, said:

So open regedit and go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager and look at the value BootExecute .

Which programs are started there?

BootExecute has the value 'autocheck autochk *'. Is that what you mean?

MagicAndre1981, on 09 August 2012 - 02:26 PM, said:

Here RequestCredentials takes most time. So enter your password faster.

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.

MagicAndre1981, on 09 August 2012 - 02:26 PM, said:

And finally starting all tools at login takes 11s. You can try to Disable the ATI Control Center and use other tools like ATI Tray Tools or MSI Afterburner. The ATI/AMD tools is coded in .Net and such apps can start slowly.

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?

This post has been edited by f1charlie: 10 August 2012 - 05:20 AM

[MagicAndre1981]

f1charlie, on 09 August 2012 - 04:13 PM, said:

MagicAndre1981, on 09 August 2012 - 02:26 PM, said:

So open regedit and go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager and look at the value BootExecute .

Which programs are started there?

BootExecute has the value 'autocheck autochk *'. Is that what you mean?

yes, this is what I want to know. Check your HDDs for errors. I can see you use external USB drives. Disconnect them before booting your PC. Maybe this causes the delay.

f1charlie, on 09 August 2012 - 04:13 PM, said:

MagicAndre1981, on 09 August 2012 - 02:26 PM, said:

And finally starting all tools at login takes 11s. You can try to Disable the ATI Control Center and use other tools like ATI Tray Tools or MSI Afterburner. The ATI/AMD tools is coded in .Net and such apps can start slowly.

I don't use the ATI Control Centre, so I could look at uninstalling and installing only the driver.

yes do this.


And yes, I can see high Disk IO usage. Avast has a large impact. It takes 50s to read the MFT of your HDD. I can also see that the Windows Search Service takes a long time to start.

This post has been edited by MagicAndre1981: 10 August 2012 - 11:26 AM

[f1charlie]

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.liv...2B8036206DE!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!

This post has been edited by f1charlie: 11 August 2012 - 04:52 AM

[MagicAndre1981]

the new trace is much, much faster:

<timing bootDoneViaExplorer="53824" bootDoneViaPostBoot="82624" osLoaderDuration="1769" postBootRequiredIdleTime="10000" postBootDisturbance="18800"

so booting to desktop takes 53 s and your Windows is filly booted in 72s.

PreSMSS is still slow:

<interval name="PreSMSS" startTime="0" endTime="23548" duration="23548">

The ATI driver causes a long delay:

Quote

<phase name="systemStart" startTime="9533" endTime="23490" duration="13956">
<pnpObject name="amdkmdap" type="Driver" activity="Load" startTime="10003" endTime="18224" duration="8221" prePendTime="8221" />
<pnpObject name="\REGISTRY\MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\amdkmdap" type="unknown" activity="unknown" startTime="10019" endTime="18224" duration="8204" prePendTime="8204" />
<pnpObject name="DXGKrnl" type="Driver" activity="Load" startTime="11361" endTime="18224" duration="6862" prePendTime="6862" />
<pnpObject name="amdkmdag" type="Driver" activity="Load" startTime="10019" endTime="11361" duration="1341" prePendTime="1341" />

Do you use the latest driver fro your ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT? if not try this one:

http://support.amd.c...cyproducts.aspx

Starting the services and the Explorer takes very long. And this is mostly casues by Avast. When you doubleclick on the ETL and go to the graph

 Avast_Disk_usage.png (13.98K)
Number of downloads: 15

you see that avast causes a really high Disk usage. So, try a different Av tool.

[f1charlie]

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.

This post has been edited by f1charlie: 11 August 2012 - 09:49 AM

[MagicAndre1981]

f1charlie, on 11 August 2012 - 09:41 AM, said:

How long should the driver take to load?

I ave no idea value. But your time is too long. Have you used the normal 12.6 driver? The normal version should no longer support DirectX9/10 hardware. Maybe this causes the issues.

f1charlie, on 11 August 2012 - 09:41 AM, said:

That disk utilization graph is useful - a pity it doesn't appear as default!

the new Win8 version is more worse. It shows completely empty and you have to drag & drop the graphs you need. But new users simply don't what they need, but MS doesn't understand this

f1charlie, on 11 August 2012 - 09:41 AM, said:

so out with Avast and in with Avira. So far, it is not giving me the same irritation!

nice to hear this. How long does Windows now boot? Generate the XML with the command in the "Trace tutorial" and look at the values.

[f1charlie]

<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!

[MagicAndre1981]

can you make a new boot trace? This time, also open the CAB file in the same folder, extract the file ReadyBoot.etl.old and run

xperf -merge YOURTracefile.ETL ReadyBoot.etl.old FINALTARCEWITHReadyBoot.etl

xbootmgr only includes the Readyboot events by dfault in Windows 7 or later.

Have you checked the Disk graph? Is there still a process which causes high disk usgae?

[f1charlie]

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?

[MagicAndre1981]

yes, black is not good.

But the "Apowersoft_AudioDevice" still starts slowly. Can you update this driver?

And what I can see is that WindwosDender service task 33s to stop:

<serviceTransition name="WinDefend" group="COM Infrastructure" transition="stop" totalTransitionTimeDelta="33426"

And the services "File sharing" and LanmanWorkstation which provies funtions to map network drives also start slowly:

<serviceTransition name="LanmanWorkstation" group="NetworkProvider" transition="start" totalTransitionTimeDelta="6188"/> 
  <serviceTransition name="LanmanServer" group="NetworkProvider" transition="start" totalTransitionTimeDelta="15160"

Also VistaFirewallService starts slowly. Why don't you use the Windows Firewall?

Also why do you run tools like \SUPERAntiSpyware if you already use a AntiVirus tool?

[p5ym0n]

Andre (The Great) .
I've been experiencing really long start delays for the last couple of days and hope you can help.
I've pm'ed you the link to the xml export. Unfortunately not able to include a drivers report as this was causing me a boot BSOD loop.
My main boot drive is a Crucial SSD that benchmarks at around 390 megabytes per second read vta SATA 6 gig.
I'm running Windows 7 64 Home Premium which used to boot up in around 30 seconds.

Anyway, hope you are able to help.

Many thanks for your help via this forum.

Regards.

Simon.

[MagicAndre1981]

WinlogonInit is slow and takes 169s:

<interval name="WinlogonInit" startTime="15547" endTime="184496" duration="168948">

But I need the ETL file to see the cause.

[p5ym0n]

Many thanks for the prompt response.
ETL file uploaded and link sent via PM.

Cheers.

[p5ym0n]

Just thought I'd reply to say I've resolved the issue.
It was actually a mapped drive connection to a NAS drive that had locked up and required rebooting.
Once the NAS drive was reset, Windows starts up without delay now.
Many thanks for your time though, and although I found this issue without actually trying to decipher the ETL log, I'm still curious if anything in there would of helped track that issue down.

[f1charlie]

Andre thank you again for replying. I'm sorry for the delay, but I have been away.

MagicAndre1981, on 13 August 2012 - 02:27 PM, said:

yes, black is not good.

Should I run the Readyboot trainer again?

MagicAndre1981, on 13 August 2012 - 02:27 PM, said:

But the "Apowersoft_AudioDevice" still starts slowly. Can you update this driver?

This was from giveawayoftheday, so there is no support.

MagicAndre1981, on 13 August 2012 - 02:27 PM, said:

And what I can see is that WindwosDender service task 33s to stop:

<serviceTransition name="WinDefend" group="COM Infrastructure" transition="stop" totalTransitionTimeDelta="33426"

Any idea what would cause that?

MagicAndre1981, on 13 August 2012 - 02:27 PM, said:

And the services "File sharing" and LanmanWorkstation which provies funtions to map network drives also start slowly:

<serviceTransition name="LanmanWorkstation" group="NetworkProvider" transition="start" totalTransitionTimeDelta="6188"/> 
  <serviceTransition name="LanmanServer" group="NetworkProvider" transition="start" totalTransitionTimeDelta="15160"

Can these be speeded up? I don't use any network drives, so could these be disabled?

MagicAndre1981, on 13 August 2012 - 02:27 PM, said:

Also VistaFirewallService starts slowly. Why don't you use the Windows Firewall?

This is just a front end to Vista firewall which allows more control over outgoing processes.

MagicAndre1981, on 13 August 2012 - 02:27 PM, said:

Also why do you run tools like \SUPERAntiSpyware if you already use a AntiVirus tool?

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!

[MagicAndre1981]

p5ym0n, on 15 August 2012 - 04:30 AM, said:

Just thought I'd reply to say I've resolved the issue.
It was actually a mapped drive connection to a NAS drive that had locked up and required rebooting.
Once the NAS drive was reset, Windows starts up without delay now.

I can see this, too:

 WinLogonInit.png (47.01K)
Number of downloads: 9

It takes 160s to reconnect the network drive.

f1charlie, on 15 August 2012 - 11:06 AM, said:

Should I run the Readyboot trainer again?

you can try it.

f1charlie, on 15 August 2012 - 11:06 AM, said:

Any idea what would cause that?

not really.Open regedit.exe, go to "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Defender" and set the value DisableAntiSpyware to 1.

f1charlie, on 15 August 2012 - 11:06 AM, said:

MagicAndre1981, on 13 August 2012 - 02:27 PM, said:

And the services "File sharing" and LanmanWorkstation which provies funtions to map network drives also start slowly:

<serviceTransition name="LanmanWorkstation" group="NetworkProvider" transition="start" totalTransitionTimeDelta="6188"/> 
  <serviceTransition name="LanmanServer" group="NetworkProvider" transition="start" totalTransitionTimeDelta="15160"

Can these be speeded up? I don't use any network drives, so could these be disabled?

you can disable both if you don't need them.

f1charlie, on 15 August 2012 - 11:06 AM, said:

This is just a front end to Vista firewall which allows more control over outgoing processes.

Windows includes the advanced config UI. Look at the admin options in control panel.

[p5ym0n]

Andre.
You are a star, and many thanks for pointing the location of the drive in the log.
I've been having a good look at the ETL file, along with posts and replies in this useful thread. It is making sense now thanks to your informative posts.

Cheers.

Simon.

[microboom]

I gave this a try on Sunday, and got positive results. Went from 2:30 boot times to about 1min, but unfortunately it seems to be back to those over 2 min boots. I've been trying for a while to lower my boot times, and this seems to give the best results. In the past I have tried disconnecting all my USB (excluding my wifi adapter and keyboard adapter), and my second HDD, and my esata external drive. Which didn't do anything to decrease the times.

Here is my boot trace:

https://dl.dropbox.c...6/boottrace.rar

Hopefully, someone can pinpoint the culprit, and I can get these boot times to an appropriate level.

Thanks.

[MagicAndre1981]

Your Windows boots in 36s to the desktop and is fully booted in 65s:

 <timing bootDoneViaExplorer="36634" bootDoneViaPostBoot="75334"

What I can see is that 2 services start slowly:

<serviceTransition name="MSSQL$SQLEXPRESS" group="" transition="start" totalTransitionTimeDelta="8525"
<serviceTransition name="WSearch" group="" transition="start" totalTransitionTimeDelta="8668" 
 

if you don't need MS SQL Server Express all the time, start the service on demand.

The largest delay is caused by starting all apps at logon. Do you really need all those Logitech tools at startup?