Member Avatar for daniel329

Hey everyone, our office recently purchased a Dell XPS 13 for one of our employees. It is a high end Core 2 Duo 2.66 with 4GB of RAM and a NVIDIA Hybrid SLI. It originally came with Vista Home Premium but I did a clean install to Windows 7 Pro. I went ahead and installed the required programs for day to day usage and the startup was clocked at 5.5 mins! It hangs at the Please Wait screen before displaying the login page and once the user logs in it stays at the Welcome screen for quite a while as well. I have disabled all startup items and startup time WAS normal. However when I tried going through the list and disabling and restarting to find the culprit I wound up going through the whole list and the startup was still slow? Help? Startup programs are Kaspersky A/V, NVIDIA SLI, LogMeIn, and Facial Recognition software. Ideas? I'm stumped
Thanks,
Daniel

  • 4 Contributors
  • 3 Replies
  • 186 Views
  • 21 Hours Discussion Span
  • Latest Post Latest Post by hughv

Dani AI

Generated

Given 's description of a clean Windows 7 install that hangs at "Please wait" and then at "Welcome," the pattern points less at ordinary startup items and more at drivers, services, shell extensions or network/profile timeouts. 's point about the re-enabled item, 's log suggestion and 's Event Viewer pointer are all useful; below is a practical, ordered troubleshooting workflow to isolate the underlying cause.

Recommended sequence (priority order):

  • Safe-mode check: a much faster Safe Mode boot implies a non-Microsoft driver/service is at fault.
  • Boot log: enable "Boot Logging" (F8 menu), then inspect C:\Windows\ntbtlog.txt for drivers that "did not load" or load order anomalies.
  • Autoruns audit: use Sysinternals Autoruns to review Logon, Services, Drivers and Explorer shell extensions (msconfig misses many items). Disable suspicious non‑Microsoft entries in small groups and re-test.
  • Event Viewer focus: filter System/Application logs for the boot time; watch for service timeouts, Winlogon/User Profile Service errors and disk I/O or network-related errors (check timestamps).
  • Uninstall tests: temporarily uninstall system-level utilities (antivirus, remote-access and biometric packages) rather than merely disabling them — many leave drivers/services active.
  • Disk/system integrity: run system scans to rule out filesystem or OS corruption:
sfc /scannow
chkdsk C: /f /r

For deeper diagnosis, capture a boot trace with Windows Performance Recorder (boot profile) or use Process Monitor's boot logging; those traces quantify which drivers/services consume the most time. Also check chipset/storage drivers and vendor BIOS/firmware updates and perform a clean GPU driver reinstall (clean uninstall before reinstall) when hybrid graphics drivers are present. Back up before BIOS updates.

Common culprits are AV/agent hooks, mismatched storage/chipset drivers, unsigned drivers or Explorer shell extensions and offline mapped network resources. A methodical approach — boot logging + Autoruns + selective uninstall or driver update — typically isolates the problematic component.

Recommended Answers

All 3 Replies

Member Avatar for caperjack

I have disabled all startup items and startup time WAS normal.

ok normal when you turn them off

disabling and restarting to find the culprit I wound up going through the whole list and the startup was still slow?l

so one of them had to make it go slow again ,
would the last one that you turned back on before the reboot that was slow

Edited by caperjack because: n/a
Member Avatar for aka_amboy

Do you know how to run HijackThis on your unit? Send me the log result if it's okay with you.

"Cogito. Ergo, sum..."

Member Avatar for hughv

Check the System Log in Event Viewer.

Be a part of the DaniWeb community

We're a friendly, industry-focused community of developers, IT pros, digital marketers, and technology enthusiasts meeting, networking, learning, and sharing knowledge.