It has been 6 months since I brought my desktop having Windows 7 Professional x86. Initially the system rebooted fast and also shut down fast. Now the situation is not same. When started, I see "Welcome" screen for some time and the "Shutting down" for about 3-4 minutes :-0 I understand that I have installed lots of software after I brought it but I guess that's fine else what the use of a PC?
So, how can I optimize the start/shut down time?
Best Answer
Windows startup can be mainly divided into three parts:
Windows core system boot
Windows logon screen / graphical mode
automatic
startup mode so Windows will wait for them to start before it lets you log in.logon security
is enabled. The reason is simply that Windows has to wait for the authentication service to come up before it's able to authenticate users by fingerprint etc.automatic
) and then set it todisabled
for test purposes. If you find your system faster after disabling some services, then reset to the previous state one-by-one and test again unless you found the guilty service. Note that not every service which is not a core Windows service is evil. For example I've just discovered, that when disabling the "nVidia Stereo Service" YouTube 3D videos encoded in WebM play very choppy (even non-3D ones) in Firefox 4.0.1. That's just one example. If you're not sure whether a specific service shall be left disabled, then better ask for it (here?). But for testing purposes all non-core services can be disabled usually without breaking your system.Startup applications
msconifg.exe
by typingmsconfig.exe
in the search bar and pressing CTRL+Shift+Enter, or just right-click and select "Run as administrator".HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
andHKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
(64-bit systems have an additional dedicated 64-bit path). You might just uncheck basically all startup items here for testing or click the "Disable all" button at the bottom right.Of course there are many other possible factors which could make Windows to boot slow. Including hardware failures.
I strongly advise also to check the system and application event log (start
event viewer
) and check for any errors. It might give indication about failing devices. For example if your HDD is about to fail it might cause delays by required read retries - this could delay startup a lot and decrease overall system performance.Another approach you can try:
If your system seems to continuously access your hard drive or your CPU is always fully loaded it could have a big impact on overall performance too. Open the task manager and look for tasks which show a high CPU usage.
To get a more close overview about what's going on inside your system I recommend launching the
Resource Monitor
. It will be able to show you CPU, Memory, Disk and Network activity per process. So it's easy to find processes which are causing a lot of system load.In most cases processes which cause big Disk I/O load will have the most impact on system performance. In
Resource Monitor
go to the Disk tab and sort the process list by "Total (B/sec)".Also make sure to visit your hardware vendor update sites and update to the latest driver versions for all components.