Rig behaving strange, long boot times

[Silent-Runner]

Hi peeps,

the rig of my wife is behaving strange since a coulpe of days. Boot takes some time, and today the rig totally hang up while booting. After a reset everything seems to be back to normal again. But still....

I checked for virus and trojan and so on, system seems to be clean. Checked the event logs just to find the well known event 100 stuff. Checked tons of forums for it and it's clearly a well known issue. Would it be just the longer boot-up-times, fekk it, but a system freeze is no fun, at least for me.

And no, i don't wanna do a clean new install. Would take ages to download all the stuff she has installed right now.

Her rig is almost the same as mine, just Vista 32 (don't ask me why...).

Any help would be apprecciated.

As the event log didn't tell anything about the culprit who's causing this i'm a bit outta clues. Did a defrag already to no avail.

[Dr. Zhivago]

My HTPC has a fairly long boot time. I discovered it was the (2) Hauppauge HVR-2250 Dual ClearQAM Tuner Card's driver initializing that was the cause of it. I used the Windows Performance Toolkit to figure it out. There isn't anything I can do about my boot time because those cards just take a long time to initialize, but at least I know WHY the boot time is slow. Also, the machine is rarely rebooted. I'm running windows 7, but the process is the same for Vista.

Here is a very good article explaining what to do:

http://helpdeskgeek.com/how-to/speed-up-boot-time-in-windows-vista/

There is a link to download the WPT within the article.

Please feel free to ask questions.

[caveman-jim]

Here is a very good article explaining what to do:

http://helpdeskgeek.com/how-to/speed-up-boot-time-in-windows-vista/

There is a link to download the WPT within the article.

Please feel free to ask questions.

Added to OS Useful Info sticky.

[Dr. Zhivago]

Added to OS Useful Info sticky.

[Silent-Runner]

Well, i'll give that a try. Thanks. I'll report back if i find something.

[xNaquada]

HDD failure.

Run SMART tests.

Had this issue 2x in the past.. 1 time was a bad SATA cable (how rare is that... jeez) and one a HHD about to go.

Run SMART. Check it.

[Silent-Runner]

I'll try that too but i seriously ain't hope it's the hdd dieing, that would suck badly.

[Silent-Runner]

Well, i checked the hdd.

Health status: OK!
Performance Status: Exellent!

Temp: 33° C
Work Time: 3 months 22 days 17 hours

But i also checked system with sfc/ scannow

checked the cbs.log and found that:


2010-03-19 17:16:55, Info CSI 00000007@2010/3/19:16:16:55.391 CSI Transaction @0x434b10 destroyed

Check told me that it couldn't repair "some files"

so...uhm...

Checked various forums, but didn't find anything helpful. Maybe you can point me in a helpful direction?

Thx in advance

[Dr. Zhivago]

Here is a MSKB article conerning the TrustedInstaller service. Link It has some similar information to your error in the CBS log. Is the TrustedInstaller service set to "Manual" on your wife's PC?

[Silent-Runner]

I'll check that too, thx for the link. You simply have to luv these error-messages.

"oops, something's not ok at yer system, but tell ya what i won't tell you what! Instead i'll give you a logfile with 67345642136541273416243671 lines, eat that, sucker"

*sigh*

/rant

[Dr. Zhivago]

Oh crap, I can't believe I didn't think of this already. In Device Manager, in the IDE/ATA/ATAPI controllers category, make sure the HDD is running in Ultra DMA Mode. You need to check the different Channels "Advanced Settings" tab. If they're in PIO Mode, uninstall/reinstall the devices.

[Silent-Runner]

Haven't had any issues with updates as far as i can tell, but well, you never know. Will have a look into Pio/DMA when i'm getting home.

Thanks for all the suggestions.

Ultra DMA is activated. -.-

One thing i noticed is that there seem to be too much usb-stuff



Although the rig is telling me, that all these "devices" are working properly..

Other than that i haven't found anything unusual. On a sidenote, i hate it when something is clearly wrong and you can't lay your finger on it, makes me really mad.

BTW i've found a nice tool for monitoring your HDD it's called: HDD life Pro. You can get it here . Maybe worth a look for some members here.