The start-up takes a good 4 minutes before I can open a webpage, after that it's blazing fast with all operations.



But now the shut-down process just hangs with the message - saving settings or something like that. Probably a good 10 mins before it does shutdown.



I went into msconfig, not sure what to do there



What's wrong with my computer?  



I have an 4 year old Dell XPS720 desktop with Quad Core 2, 4 gig ram and only 500 GB HDD. I ran malwarebytes and ccleaner.

Same problem here with one of my XP machines on shut down. Haven't been able to figure it out and it's been about a year.

And I have done everything I could find out for this problem.

more help?

do you have a cat stuck in your fan?

It's a PC - It's not slower, you are simply perceiving time faster.

(Genuinely interested to see what the PC gurus suggest.)

in msconfig, check the startup tab.
see what doesn't belong. you should be able to search on all of it to tell you if it is necessary or not.

Slow to start and slow to shut down?

I'd say just leave it running.

First go to Start ––> msconfig, click the Startup tab and deselect anything that you're not using all the time with the exception of your virus protection.  And please don't tell me you're running one of the bloated and so called "internet security" programs like Norton.  If so consider giving it the deep six and replacing it with something with a smaller footprint.





Now go to one of the virtual file libraries (download.com or majorgeeks.com will work fine) and get 3 programs, CCleaner Slim, Malwarebytes and IObits Smart Defrag.  Install them.  Run CCleaner, deselect "Recently typed URL's" and "History" and run the cleaner.  Click it's Registry tab and scan the registry.  Let it back up the registry and then fix all problems.  Now run Malwarebytes, click the Update tab, update it then go back to Scan and do the Quickscan.  Remove everything it finds.  Run Smart Defrag, make sure the C drive is the only one selected and click Start and let it do it's thing.





Get back to us if it still runs slow after this.

i found out that my Pandora One desktop app was corrupted and it caused it to hang during shutdown, because it kept running in the background.



 

Review your start up items and defrag your hard drive.

for the start-up, there's so many things i don't know where to begin?



 

You can search for ages and spend a lot of time chasing down every little thing that's wrong with it.  But after 4 years of loading and unloading various programs and data, you're unlikely to find it all.



My advice, on a Windows system:  Reload the OS at least every 24 months.  Then only load the programs you need, as you need them.



You'll be shocked at how fast your computer suddenly is.  And you'll also realize how much software is hanging around on your HDD that you don't use anymore.



If it were Linux... that would be a different story.  But I've yet to see a Linux system get anywhere close to as afflicted as Windows gets just doing nothing.

Anything you recognize and don't use is probably safe to disable on start up, stuff you use every once in a while doesn't need to run on startup either. Lots of programs will insert themselves into your startup when installed. google the rest of them and disable the ones you don't use or need. if you aren't sure leave it to come back too..

begin by getting a Mac..

sounds like normal MS bloat..

Unfortunately, a PC running XP should be re-formatted and reinstalled every so often.



It's time for yours.

i did, my macbook pro 15" i5 is coming on weds



and i finished defrag and it's made a big difference in shut-down, still working on start-up
 

Install Windows 7.



Problem solved.
No seriously Windows 7 is way faster at start up and shut down than any previous Windows.  You could try putting in your Win XP disk and running a repair "install".  That might fix errors that have gathered.

With most windows systems, the longer you use it, the more crap it picks up, and the whole system gets bloated and bogged down. Usually, uninstalling a bunch of programs I didn't use anymore would help tremendously. Every couple of years I had to back everything up, reformat the drive, and reinstall Windows to get it back up to speed.

Ditch temp files and move stuff off the desktop...

4 minute start up before being able to do anything is what I used to have on my xp install

the shut down issue makes me think msconfig isn't going to help



do you have a lot of stuff in My Documents and on the Desktop?

my guess is the profile is getting really big



also, if you use Avast set it to not start until other services have started

possibly a tiny bit less secure but it should help with boot up as it won't be scanning every file that loads

When I rocked xp, I usually reformatted every 6 months. keep shit clean and organized.

On boot up, go into the bios and select quick boot option. Select your hard drive to start first then cd  and flppy etc. last.

Reduce hung application timeout...
   When shutting down, Windows attempts to stop all running tasks. If a task is not responding or refuses to shut down, there?s a built-in delay before Windows will force the task to end. This delay is called the timeout, and it can be shortened if you?re experiencing problems or unreasonable delays when shutting down your system: Go to start. run. and type in regedit

   Navigate to
   HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop

   Double-click the WaitToKillAppTimeout value. This number controls the time to wait, in milliseconds, before unresponsive applications are
   forced to close. The default is 20000 (twenty seconds), but it can be decreased to any value; the minimum is 1 millisecond, although it?s
   impractical to use any value smaller than about 2000 (two seconds) here.

   Also in this key is the HungAppTimeout value, which does pretty much the same thing as WaitToKillAppTimeout; just enter the same number for both values.

   Navigate to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control

   Double-click the WaitToKillServiceTimeout value. This works the same as the WaitToKillAppTimeout value described above, except that it
   applies to services instead of applications.

   Close the Registry Editor when you?re done & restart Windows for the change to take effect.
   These values also affect the timeouts at times other than just shutting down, such as when you click End Process in the Windows Task Manager.

I have a few Windows machines that I have to deal with in my business but my machine is a new MacBook Pro.

It will boot up in 45 seconds and by that I mean it has found the wireless and is ready to go.
Shuts down even quicker.





Bill

Agree 100%.



 

How about don't shut it down.  I haven't turned off my kids 2004 eMac since we moved to this place in 2005.  Well, it might have been de-powered during a coupled t-stroms when the whole house went down.

But still, like the doctor said when I told him "it hurts when I do this".. and He says "don't do that."

LOL

BTDT. Didn't do squat.

We're talking about Windows here.

I use hibernate usually instead of shutting down; it's faster on this machine.

Check the IDE channel for your hard drive to see if it hasn't reverted to PIO mode.  It should be DMA.  Sometimes it reverts to PIO which is really slow.
(Look in device manager under disk drive controllers, primary IDE channel, details tab.

That's because of all the "updates"...

Tag for later reading...

Run msconfig as mentioned. Unselect any programs that load at startup except virus protection, etc.

The problem is many programs these days pre-load at start-up so when you do decide to run the program, it loads faster than if it had to load cold. The drawback is they all want to pre-load at start-up, so if you have 20 programs with this behavior, the initial start-up is painfully slow.

Also, if you have programs that automatically check for updates, these programs often load an updater program at start-up to check for new versions of their respective software. The updater may or may not terminate after performing this check.

There is a pre-load section in the registry that I believe will cause certain DLLs to pre-load as well. This list can contain 100 DLLs.

Taken together, an XP system loaded with an office suite, various desktop publishing tools, and other large suites will at some point start taking 10-15 minutes to fully load. And shutdown time can also take 5-10 minutes.

You can try various registry cleaners and they help a little, but at some point the only solution is to reformat the disk and reinstall the OS. For pre-loaded systems like Dell systems, this is not too bad as they give you a partition or a CD with all the software that comes preloaded. You just need to re-run it (after backing up your data.)

They appeared to fix this problem to a large extent in Vista and Windows 7. I run Vista Home Premium with MS Office, Visual Studio 2005, 2008, and 2010, and a slew of little helper and utilities, and Vista still loads very fast.

This fix in itself is good enough reason to upgrade to Windows 7.

This worked wonders on my laptop!!

Thank You!

after this run chkdsk /f

Thanks for the tip. Make sure a laptop isn't on battery before running defrag. It won't run on battery.

Before doing too much. MAKE A BACKUP! It's pretty amazing what you forgot to save/track/archive until you suddenly need it and, oh, yeah - that was on the old machine.

Little things like, oh, Product keys, install codes, email addresses, picture of the hot waitre...nvm

Blow away MS windows

Install Ubuntu (Linux)

you will thank me later

Make sure you have at least a gig of ram and reinstall XP.

Tune-up Utilities 2010 made this relatively idiot-proof for me.