x61t Vista Horrific boot times!!!!!!!!! (help please)

[gdavis]

I've had my x61t with vista for a year and a half and mostly love it. However from the beginning, it takes about 30 minutes of time every day when I start the computer before the hard drive stops spinning and prevents my use of the computer until it is completed. I can do some work in between for brief moments of time, but mostly it is on its own and I cannot use the machine for this time.

I've turned off 'index search' and turned off 'disk optimization' software. But I can't figure out what is going on.

Someone must know what is causing this at this point....

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

[Marin85]

This extreme HDD activity is most likely caused by prefetch/superfetch. To turn them off, you need to do following:
1. run -> services.msc -> disable superfetch service
2. run -> regedit -> HKLM -> System -> CurrentControlSet -> Control ->Session Manager -> Memory Management -> Prefetch Parameters -> set EnablePrefetcher and EnableSuperfetch to 0 instead of 3.

BTW, that´s one of my favorite tweaks for Vista

Apart from this, maybe you should scan for malware too. Some other programs starting with windows could also cause prolonged HD activity (depending on the program).

You can turn on indexing again, it doesn´t have that impact on the overall performance.

Hope this helps

Marin

[gdavis]

Marin85

Hey, thanks! I did the changes you recommended and it seemed better, but it's now running the hard drive similarly as before. It took 14 minutes until it stopped the non-stop HD use. I also turned off Windows Defender in case that was spending time running the disc.

I found that the registry settings you recommended were in a different area than the one you had listed. I assume that's normal for those to be in different locations based on the specific set up of the computer, correct?

Any other thoughts on what might be running?

[Marin85]

Different location What is the other location?

[jdhurst]

After that long, there is nothing Vista would be doing to take 30 minutes. In the worst case, my Vista machine churns away for 5 or 6 minutes, but nothing stops me from using it. I do have indexing turned on, and usually shadow storage is busy initially. But never 30 minutes.

Have you checked for malware? Do you have an AntiVirus that is doing a long startup scan? Do you have too little memory (less than 3Gb is too little for Vista). Do you have a slow hard drive?
... JDH

[richk]

Something must be timing out. Look in the event log.

[Ken Fox]

One thing that I haven't seen suggested before is that you might have a hardware problem of some sort. If you do a right click on "computer" on your desktop, then click on properties, then on "device manager," on the left top -- you might find something amiss.

I wonder if you have some sort of subtle defect in your hard drive that is causing this behavior (most probably that would not show up in device manager).

If you have access to a spare hard drive, you could swap the spare drive with the one in the machine and using your recovery disk set you could see if the behavior you describe on boot-up continues. If you don't have a spare drive, assuming the machine is still under warranty, you could call Lenovo service and describe your problem. They might suggest that the problem is the hard drive and offer to replace it. If not in warranty, hard drives are now dirt cheap, so you could use this as an opportunity to upgrade the drive (7K320, 320gb 7200 rpm Hitachi drives have recently been going for less than $60 after a rebate, at least here in the USA). Replacing the hard drive in your machine might take 10 minutes if you are totally inept at mechanical things, 2 minutes if you know what you are doing.

I would not consider the situation you describe as tolerable, and would do whatever I could to remedy it immediately.

ken

Addendum: Check which applications are being automatically loaded into memory on each bootup. In the bottom left (start button) do RUN->MSCONFIG then return. Anything that is starting automatically at boot up that you don't need (probably more than half of what is there unless you have previously modified the list) should be unchecked. There should be some improvement on your next boot up, and the system will otherwise run faster.

[gpvillamil]

Try looking in the system event viewer as well.

Right-click Computer, select Manage, in the left-hand pane select Event Viewer, Windows Log, System, and see what sorts of things you see around startup. I'd be looking for disk errors or network timeouts.

Check out AutoRuns from Sysinternals (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysi ... 63902.aspx) - that will help you track down any unusual startup activity.

Such long startup delays are unusual in Vista. I leave Prefetch and Indexing on, and generally my X61 Tablet is ready to go in about 3 minutes or so.

[David Ross]

One way to tell if the problem is hardware or software is to dual-boot to another OS. I use the WUBI install of Xubuntu (http://wubi-installer.org/) because it is painless: no disk repartitioning, and both installation and uninstallation are Windows apps. I recently used this to determine that a tablet pen problem was hardware, not software.

David

[ArtShapiro]

Well, it might be interesting to use Task Manager to see who's doing all the I/O. By default, this information isn't shown, but you can add the requisite fields. CTRL-SHIFT-ESC to open Task Manager, View/Select Columns and add count and bytes fields for read, write, and other. Drag the window to be horizontally larger so all this stuff can be seen at once. Sort on, say, the "other" bytes by clicking on the column heading twice so the biggest hog is at the top. See which task is accumulating values the fastest, and use that as the basis of your investigation.

Art

[michaelqr]

Me too. I just had a X61t with Vista Home Premium a week ago, that's so slow and the boot time is around 30 minutes (actually the hard drive spinning). Everytime I use the fingerprint reader, it takes one minute to process.

I want to switch to XP 2005 tablet, but I can not find any source of thinkxp 2.2.

BTW, I have 1GB memory only, is it worth to buy another 1GB or more?

Anybody could help!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Marin85]

Welcome to our forum!

In case of Vista, having 2 or more GBs of RAM is IMO a must This extremely long HD activity after boot is most likes caused by two things: prefetch/superfetch and Vista swap file due to little RAM your ThinkPad has. And yes, fingerprint reader takes its share in the boot time.

Cheers,

Marin

[Ken Fox]

One last suggestion, and this applies not specifically to the X61T, but to all laptops that are used on a wireless network, especially if you move around and use various WiFi networks on a regular basis.

Antivirus programs, including those free ones that many of us use (Antivir; AVG; et all) set themselves up on installation to contact the server for virus file updates each time the machine boots. During the boot up process, the antivirus programs can end up seeing this updated virus file information before your laptop has connected to a wireless network. The result is that the computer more or less "hangs" for whatever is the "timeout" period the antivirus program sets up, before it abandons the search for the new virus file. This can make the computer essentially non-responsive for a minute or more.

This problem is less important if you use the notebook plugged into a network by ethernet cord, as those connection "handshakes" tend to be nearly instantaneous.

Access Connections, the Lenovo networking program, has some good features, but it is no speed demon and probably makes this situation worse.

I have now set Antivir not to automatically update on the laptop I will be traveling with in France, starting in a few days. The boot up process was much quicker than before, shaving about half a minute off of the boot time, and mine was already fairly short since I disable most of programs that are put into the startup file after installation.

Of course, if you do this, you must remember to manually update your virus files, or you will not be fully protected.

ken

[Marin85]

That is a very good point. On every new (re)install of Windows I set AVG to manual updating. Basically, the same idea applies to other programs as well, that check for updates upon windows startup. If I have any, I always turn this feature off for the reasons already mentioned by Ken.

[ArtShapiro]

While the point about virus definition updates is valid, I don't think this can explain away the original assertion of a half hour wait.

Could it be set to do a full scan upon bootup? That would really do the machine a mischief.

That aside, my own X61 can often - not always - take a good five minutes to come up on Vista Ultimate, and I never know if the fingerprint reader is being ornery or if the machine is simply too busy to deal with it. The hard drive light is heavily lit during this time. I've not had time or ambition to investigate, but there might well be something bad endemic to the X61 series.

Art

[Ken Fox]

While the point about virus definition updates is valid, I don't think this can explain away the original assertion of a half hour wait.

Could it be set to do a full scan upon bootup? That would really do the machine a mischief.

That aside, my own X61 can often - not always - take a good five minutes to come up on Vista Ultimate, and I never know if the fingerprint reader is being ornery or if the machine is simply too busy to deal with it. The hard drive light is heavily lit during this time. I've not had time or ambition to investigate, but there might well be something bad endemic to the X61 series.

Art

I doubt it has anything major to do with the X6x series, rather it has everything to do with what you have in your startup folder. If you are unfamiliar with how to modify which programs go into memory at startup, there are several ways to check this and similarly, to modify it.

Perhaps the easiest is to google for ccleaner.exe, a nice small (and free) machine and registry cleaner, which by the way will help to clean out clutter on your hard drive and in your registry. In addition, if you click on "tools" after it is installed and running, then click on the "startup" tab, you can see what is set to startup with your machine. Uncheck everything you are sure you don't need, which should be at least half the entries. You will be amazed at what a difference this makes.

My X6x machines don't take anywere near half of 5 minutes to boot up, and I don't believe this has anything much to do with Vista Ultimate as opposed to other Vista versions, since you can always choose what you allow to startup each time, with your machine.

ken

[Marin85]

A few points:
1. Just a warning about the reg cleaning feature of CCleaner: as any other reg cleaning software it´s not entirely safe and should not be blindly trusted. One should always first examine the entries suggested by CCleaner. As a matter of fact, I do have in my experience good examples of how CCleaner can break things.

2. Unfortunately, one cannot remove all entries from the startup folder, in fact not every entry has any noticeable impact on boot times. Even if the startup folder doesn´t include any entries, this is in no way a guarantee for faster boot times (cet. par.). Autoruns utility from sysinternals can be extremely helpful in similar tasks and it provides a view of much more than what is available under startup in the configuration utility, it also provides the ability to edit the things viewed by it.

3. I agree with ArtShapiro that just AV updating process could hardly be the reason for 30 min boot time. In most cases slow boot times are cumulative result of many things, but some things have more significant impact on boot times than others and hence greater share in it.

4. I think in this thread there are a few different understandings of "boot times". What I believe the OP is referring to, is the very long HD activity observed on Vista upon startup. Excluding possible hardware issues, this HD activity actually doesn´t mean that the boot process hasn´t completed, it´s rather post-boot activity of Vista, and there could be a few reasons for it:

- Vista indexing, if new contents (includes programs and data) (in noticeable amount) has been added during the past session and the machine was shut down after that. In particular this happens upon the first few reboots of Vista after its installation.

- Vista prefetch/superfetch: unfortunately, just disabling the service won´t do the trick, and there are a few registry changes required to completely disable the prefetch/superfetch functionality. For some reason, disabling prefetch/superfetch too late (understand after installing and running some programs several times) doesn´t cut off boot time as much as one would expect. For optimal result one should disable prefetch/superfetch right after finishing the installation of Vista. In my experience, disabling these features significantly reduces the post-startup HD activity in Vista to some "normal" times without any sacrifice in performance (applies to any recent high-performance laptop HDs; on older laptop HDs this is not the case though).

- Scheduled tasks like within Lenovo System Update (similarly to what Ken already pointed out) or disk defrag, that would naturally cause noticeable HD activity.

5. Lenovo applications like R&R, CSS, all the TVT stuff have noticeable impact on boot times as most of them are also represented as services in windows. Disabling many of those services from automatic start results in program malfunction or mostly fail to launch. Many programs like CS4 or Autodesk software come with licensing services that add to boot times. Other things that increase windows boot time are Lenovo Power Manager and ACPI driver, graphics card driver and the corresponding graphics card control center (for example CCC for ATI cards) as well as windows updates over time.

6. (Most mysteriously) "Missing components" that windows might be looking for (not necessarily OS components) also increase boot times.

Cheers,

Marin

EDIT:typos...

[Ken Fox]

I would definitely NOT disable everything in the startup folder; that would be "asking for trouble."

To be more complete I should probably have started with the suggestion that there are lots of things installed on most computers that most users DO NOT NEED. Prime examples for most people reading this post will be such things as Lenovo's CSS (Client Security), Migration Manager, and most of the other Lenovo programs that are oriented at business people who have no support from a real, in house, IT department (I'm assuming that most large companies either have better software than these things Lenovo provides, or have concluded that these Lenovo Utilities are BAD). Home users could not possibly have much use for these things, and they should be uninstalled, or preferably never installed in the first place. You can do the latter easily by doing a custom factory restore on obtaining your laptop, before loading any of your own programs. Norton and related promotional programs should similarly not be installed in the first place. This will save you lots of grief over time.

Assuming for the moment that you are starting with a system that doesn't have such software as CSS (or Norton-anything) installed on it, you can further reduce the programs that startup when you boot up the computer by doing what I suggested, stopping programs from loading at boot up. There are all sorts of things that fit this description, such as the Adobe Acrobat fast loader, the application that searches for new versions of Java, etc. etc. etc. These should be disabled if you are capable of periodically searching within these applications for updates. If you have gone so far as to participate in an online computer forum, the odds are that you have this capacity.

If you want to change how your antivirus program works, specifically whether or not it searches for update files on bootup, this is best done from WITHIN the antivirus program itself, in the "options" or "preferences" tab or similar place, not in the startup program list, which could prevent the program from providing the protection that you want.

If in doubt, don't remove items from the startup folder. Most things from Microsoft (especially operating system related) should not be deleted, and if you depend on any particular application, even one from Lenovo , then you should let it (or programs required for it to perform) load up at startup as eliminating those can lead to system instability. I myself had had some misadventures with this sort of modification, and I would advise that if you don't know what you are doing, disable too few rather than too many programs at startup.

ken

[michaelqr]

This forum is amazing. Just I did all things I can do, but I just don't like vista. Now I have two options to switch to XP. Either buy a USB CDROM, or use WinPE with my flash drive to boot the machine and then install XP tablet 2005. I heared people using ThinkXP 2.2 to install, it's very fast. Could somebody find some source of those softwares?

Thank you guys. This forum really helps.

[Ken Fox]

Using my X61s at home, where it always logged onto my home wifi network, gave acceptable boot times. Right now I am traveling in France and I have found the boot up time unacceptable. In fact, it is as if the system more or less freezes on boot up, and I can't really use it all until at least 3 minutes after the start of booting up.

I've traced the likely cause to Access Connections, and having uninstalled it my boot up times are fully reasonable. I uninstalled AC and the Intel wireless driver, then reinstalled only the Intel driver, and things are much better.

Over the last several years there have been times when AC has worked well for me, and other times when it was just crap. I think the current iteration is behaving more like the latter than the former.

ken

[gpvillamil]

Good point. I don't have Access Connections installed (haven't missed it) and maybe that is why my X61 starts quickly.

To the OP that was thinking of reverting to Win XP Tablet - think about it carefully! The tablet features on Vista really are much better.

...I've traced the likely cause to Access Connections, and having uninstalled it my boot up times are fully reasonable. I uninstalled AC and the Intel wireless driver, then reinstalled only the Intel driver, and things are much better....

[jdhurst]

I honestly do not think Access Connections is such a big problem as is painted. I use Access Connections all the time and have done for years. My T61p starts very quickly and is very speedy in operations. There are two issues with respect to speed:
1. Disable all but the most frequently connections (simply uncheck) in Location Switching
2. In Vista, in Windows Network connections, delete connections that were previously deleted in AC.

If this product were as bad as painted, I would have dumped it five years ago.
... JDH

[Ken Fox]

I honestly do not think Access Connections is such a big problem as is painted. I use Access Connections all the time and have done for years. My T61p starts very quickly and is very speedy in operations. There are two issues with respect to speed:
1. Disable all but the most frequently connections (simply uncheck) in Location Switching
2. In Vista, in Windows Network connections, delete connections that were previously deleted in AC.

If this product were as bad as painted, I would have dumped it five years ago.
... JDH

It's not as bad as it has been painted, or it would be worse then useless. It HAS been highly variable in my experience, with different versions having variable interactions with the wifi card drivers (notably the Intel card drivers), and at times it has been just horrid. But in the last year or so I've used it most of the time.

One thing it does that I really do not like at all is that it adds locations even when you tell it not to add them. So, if you end up using the WiFi in a hotel that you are never going back to, that location still ends up being added and is in there until you intentionally delete it. I have no question whatsoever that it has been contributing to slow boot up times with my new X61s, and I already have a pretty lean Vista Business install on this laptop.

For the most part I don't find the program to be a huge plus, and at the moment I am not using it, at least on my current month long trip in France.

ken