Thinkpad Taking Forever to Boot

[sechs]

I had a customer drop off her Thinkpad R51 which is taking an inordinate amount of time to boot. It's gone back this afternoon with no appreciable change, as she needs it for a trip. I was only able to work on a few hours, much of which was spent waiting on reboots after making changes. It has a number of issues which don't seem likely to cause the main problem, which I find a bit baffling.

The issue: Laptop takes a long time to boot. Most of the time is spent between the Windows login screen and the user desktop coming up. The harddrive is constantly in use during Windows XP's startup.

The computer has a 4200RPM drive, so it's already a strike against it. The drive is also quite full. I clean installed this operating system myself a couple years ago, and it didn't act like this at that time.

Although the user has installed some crap, like Yahoo toolbar, I didn't find any malware. I didn't uninstall anything that I didn't reinstall, since I couldn't consult with the user.

A number of the Thinkpad apps aren't working. Sometimes it doesn't recognise the TPM chip on boot. System update fails. Rescue and recovery sometimes doesn't start and hasn't taken a snapshot in over a year.

Although it is setup to automatically download and install critical updates, it hasn't been.

Safe mode start up speed is as expected.

Next time, I should be able to spend a little more quality time. However, if anyone has any ideas on this start up issue, that's the primary problem, and the one that's giving me the most trouble.

Thanks

 

[timwhit]

Did you check the hard drive for bad sectors?

 

[Fushigi]

Off the top of my head:
- Use msconfig & un-check things in the startup area that aren't necessary. Also look for services that are set to automatic but could get by with manual (if not disabled).
- Make sure her system isn't running some sort of boot-time AV scan or similar. Not speed related but make sure the signatures are up to date.
- Run CHKDSK /F. Also, as Tim noted check the HD diagnostics for SMART errors.
- A defrag might help as well although I doubt it'd be very noticeable. Defraging the page file might help, though. There may be other useful Sysinternals utils to try.
- I'm assuming this is XP. Has SP3 been installed? No speed boost that I'm aware of but when you have the machine it would be good to update it. Also, if there's file corruption going on it might fix it.
- Consider cleaning the HD of temp files, Windows updates undelete files (the hidden in C:\WINDOWS). Run CCleaner.
- Uninstall anything apps not necessary/used. Set apps to not load their system tray icon/"speed up loading" pieces (Acrobat, Quicktime, RealPlayer, etc.).
- Check Event Viewer for anomalies.

 

[Mercutio]

Her user profile is too goddamned big. Make a new user account. Watch it load quickly.

Look for things like how many installed fonts, how many printers, how much crap is on her desktop.

 

[sechs]

Thanks for the input. I should get the machine back in my hands in about two weeks.

 

[sechs]

So, I finally got to work on this machine in earnest, and thought that folks might be interested in an update.

It seems that the major malfunction was that, because she was immediately hibernating the computer after doing work, it was never defragmenting. After forcing a number of full runs, it started booting in a far more reasonable fashion.

It also turns out that System Update no longer works, which is a big pain, as its replacement doesn't seem to work either. I manually updated some of the Thinkpad software, and this appeared to solve those problems.

I uninstalled the crap, and set a number of items to not load at boot. It now comes to the desktop pretty quick, considering the speed of the drive. It still takes a long time for the drive to completely calm down upon start up, but the desktop is useable in the mean time.

I suggested upgrading the drive or, more reasonably, just getting a new laptop; but she needs this to last about another year for her work. I recommended leaving the computer on overnight every once in a while so that it can run a long defrag session.

 

[Mercutio]

I can't imagine what she's keeping on there that needs multiple runs of defrag to fix, at least not on an NTFS drive. Is she creating and erasing thousand of 1MB files or something?

But I know DiskKeeper can be obnoxious so I guess that's not impossible. I usually just turn it off.

 

[Howell]

It also turns out that System Update no longer works, which is a big pain, as its replacement doesn't seem to work either. I manually updated some of the Thinkpad software, and this appeared to solve those problems.

Yes, I am very annoyed that Lenovo stopped supporting System Update. Very annoyed.

 

[Piyono]

I give all my clients a copy of JKDefrag.

 

[sechs]

I can't imagine what she's keeping on there that needs multiple runs of defrag to fix, at least not on an NTFS drive. Is she creating and erasing thousand of 1MB files or something?

Strictly speaking, I don't think that more than two (one being a boot-time run for system files) was truly necessary. However, each boot/defrag cycle more precisely arranges the files needed for startup.

It also makes the block display look nice.

I'm not sure how it got so out of whack, but I'm sure than a new Windows update every month probably did not help.