Windows 7 Improving Windows 7 boot and performance...

[dkperez]

System is a desktop with Asus p6T motherboard, i7 920 overclocked to 4GHz, 6GB of DDR3 memory running at a bit over 1520 MHz, 250GB Seagate SATA II drive for O/S, 4-1TB Seagate SATA II drives, DVD burner, a couple external drives and so on........
O/S is Windows 7 Professional 64-bit

Boot time:
Turn on to Windows logo (the dancing blobs)? 29 seconds
Turn to Log in - 88 seconds
Login password to desktop - 32 seconds

This seems EXTREMELY slow to me, especially since the laptop running a slower i7 720 with virtually the same programs installed boots MUCH faster..... But, of course, it only has a couple 500GB drives...

I've been through the tips, tweaks and so on.

I've run disk cleanup and cleaned up what I can
I've run the recommended services cleanup and shut down services I'm not using
I've run msconfig and shut off everything at startup that I don't need
I've got the system set to automatically do a full defrag on all disks weekly

Performance once booted isn't bad, but depending on what I'm doing I randomly get slowdowns that when looking in the Task Manager don't show anything interesting for CPU usage or extraordinary memory usage (of course, since I'm running Photoshop CS5 and Lightroom my version of "extraordinary" may be skewed since these two programs routinely use 4-5 GB of memory)..

SO, anybody got any ideas what else I should be doing to find bottlenecks and improve performance? Is there a way to get the timing for everything that's happening during boot time? So I can see if there's a specific thing that's taking a lot of time?

 

[kemical]

No problem Mitchell! Just pm me when your ready and I'll certainly help if I can.

 

[dkperez]

I've been fiddling. Just for giggles I reset EVERYTHING to defaults. AND dropped in a spare disk to install W7 on... Then installed the programs I run that are the most obvious offenders (office 2007, Photoshop CS5, Lightroom 3, and so on).... So, it's about as vanilla as I can make it. Things slowed down, although boot time didn't increase a huge amount, which I presume is because it's mostly beating on the disk?
So, I switched back to the old system disk so all the software is available... Boot got even slower, but again not a lot.

Again, to test I disconnected all the backup disks, so I'm currently running with just the O/S disk and the two primary data drives (1TB Spinpoints). Didn't make any measurable difference, although my measurements are really crude - looking at the wall clock...

Timeount in msconfig is set to 0, so it shouldn't be a problem.

I've been using my own gray (neutral gray for photo editing) background all along, but I went ahead and renamed to TranscodedWallpaper.jpg and put it in the themes directory. Also created the regedit key DelayedDesktopSwitchTimeout and set its value to 5.

In my opinion it booted faster and got to the desktop faster but I DIDN'T get to measure it 'cause during the boot my wife walked in and made me go away and do actual work! I'll get a reading the next time I reboot.

FWIW (imho) Overclocking is popular, particualarly amongst gamers. CPU's normally optimise, automatically, with motherboard components and wil adjust, or cope, with the slowest piece of hardware it may find there. Mild overclccking seems to be normally succesful, in most cases. Extreme overclcocking, as in your case, overides the CÅPU's ability to cope, and results in instability and, in many cases, bsods. If you google you will confirm this.
However, having wasted space with that comment, I would not really think that is the reason for the three slowdowns you are experiencing, but would contribute to a general poorer, or slower, performance generally..

I can't disagree with the overclocking, although from the research I did prior to making adjustments, this is a mild overclock, certainly compared to past systems. Very mild voltage increases, clock adjustments, and a huge improvement in cooling with a tower cooler make the system when overclocked run as cool or cooler than the factory cooler at default speeds...

Anyhow, I'm currently at the defaults and results from Sandra benchmarks show the performance is slightly slower in most categories than the default i7-920, but only a little.

Defragmentation on all the disks is scheduled weekly and everything shows up as 0 fragmentation.

As far as an SSD I suspect they'll get much wider use as they come down in price and up in capacity, but presently it's not cost effective.

Anyhow, it may be that my expectations are what's off and the box is running as well as it's capable of........

 

[tanzanos]

I've been fiddling. Just for giggles I reset EVERYTHING to defaults. AND dropped in a spare disk to install W7 on... Then installed the programs I run that are the most obvious offenders (office 2007, Photoshop CS5, Lightroom 3, and so on).... So, it's about as vanilla as I can make it. Things slowed down, although boot time didn't increase a huge amount, which I presume is because it's mostly beating on the disk?
So, I switched back to the old system disk so all the software is available... Boot got even slower, but again not a lot.

Again, to test I disconnected all the backup disks, so I'm currently running with just the O/S disk and the two primary data drives (1TB Spinpoints). Didn't make any measurable difference, although my measurements are really crude - looking at the wall clock...

Timeount in msconfig is set to 0, so it shouldn't be a problem.

I've been using my own gray (neutral gray for photo editing) background all along, but I went ahead and renamed to TranscodedWallpaper.jpg and put it in the themes directory. Also created the regedit key DelayedDesktopSwitchTimeout and set its value to 5.

In my opinion it booted faster and got to the desktop faster but I DIDN'T get to measure it 'cause during the boot my wife walked in and made me go away and do actual work! I'll get a reading the next time I reboot.



I can't disagree with the overclocking, although from the research I did prior to making adjustments, this is a mild overclock, certainly compared to past systems. Very mild voltage increases, clock adjustments, and a huge improvement in cooling with a tower cooler make the system when overclocked run as cool or cooler than the factory cooler at default speeds...

Anyhow, I'm currently at the defaults and results from Sandra benchmarks show the performance is slightly slower in most categories than the default i7-920, but only a little.

Defragmentation on all the disks is scheduled weekly and everything shows up as 0 fragmentation.

As far as an SSD I suspect they'll get much wider use as they come down in price and up in capacity, but presently it's not cost effective.

Anyhow, it may be that my expectations are what's off and the box is running as well as it's capable of........

Replace your SATA cable with the best quality you can find. Win 7 is very finicky with hardware components. Had a similar problem and it worked for me. Went from tortoise to supersonic!