For the past few weeks, I have noticed slow boot-up times for my Vista laptop. More recently, I have had terrible boot-ups and
I can't figure out why.
I turn my computer off through Vista and it is fine. When I power up, using the power button on my machine, it beings the
normal boot. I see my Dell bios screen load, then I can hear it check the CD drive. The webcam light flashes once and then the
scroll lock light comes on...all of this is normal. Then the screen turns off...which is also normal. But then it just stays off and the
scroll lock light turns off as well. There are five indicator lights on my machine - power, HDD activity, battery, WiFi, and
Bluetooth. For a normal boot, the power light and the WiFi light are on, in addition to some disk activity. This also happens
during this weird boot, even when my screen is turned off. There is clearly disk activity, but it is not responsive from my
keyboard. I wait about ten minutes and manually power down.
I reboot again. This time it will either do the same thing, or it will finally load Vista and go to my log-on screen.
When I log on, the computer is fine. But after a certain amount of time, the hard drive light goes off. The computer is completely
responsive, except for the random hard drive "fail." The mouse is completely responsive, but when I click on something,
Explorer freezes. I have to manually power down again.
The third (or sometimes fourth) boot is usually a success. Everything loads properly and Windows is completely responsive. The
hard drive works perfectly and it all runs smoothly.
But this strange boot-up is worrying me. This all happens in that same pattern too.
I am fairly confident I have no viruses. I have Malwarebytes, AVG, COMODO, Windows Defender, and Trojan Remover. I use two
system maintence programs - TuneUp Utilities 2009 and Advanced SystemCare Free. I perform defrags every other week and I
run the disk cleaner every week or so. Trojan Remover scans the system files and makes sure they are the appropriate size and
not corrupt, so I am also fairly confident this is not a problem with Vista, but who knows.
I have tried several times to run a complete disk check, but it always goes into that nasty boot-up where the screen turns off. I
am not sure if it is actually doing anything, so last night I let it sit like that, hoping it was running the disk check. When I woke up
in the morning, it was on my log on screen, so who knows, maybe it did run successfully.
I looked through Windows' Event Viewer and saw some errors. I don't know much about the Event Viewer, or else I could
probably just diagnose this myself. I kept seeing an error about my CD drive. Which is weird, because there is nothing in there
and it works fine when I use it. Maybe this is causing the bad boot-ups.
Any input would help. Oh, I'm using Windows Vista Home Premimum on my Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop that is less than a year
old. The hard drive is about 72% full and I have 4 gigs of RAM. With all of my start-up programs running, I only using about 10-
13% of the CPU...so clearly I am not overclocking my system or anything.
Any thoughts or suggestions would be great...I'm at a loss!