startup speed

I have a new computer with an Intel motherboard, core 2 e6300 processor, windows vista 32 bit and I don't know if the computer is performing as fast as it should. On startup, after the display screen reaches the desktop it takes about 50 seconds for all of the programs to load; this seems to be too long. After updating bios this startup time was only a couple of seconds for 2 different starups, but then went back to about 50 seconds. It is a brand new system with no spyware or viruses detected and I ran defrag. The defrag took about 40 minutes with a 250 GB hard drive. AVG virus full system scan takes about 20 minutes. Shutting down the computer takes about 30 seconds. Do these speeds sound slow or normal?
Thank you,
Matt

 

It sounds about right to me. A defrag on a brand new system shouldn't take too long however. That's the only thing that seems a bit off. The startup and shut down times are not any sort of guage of PC performance. If you have alot of startup programs, your boot times will be slower. Dell tends to ship PC's loaded with 'bloatware' that you'll probably never use and this stuff can really slow the boot speeds. Take a look at this: http://www.majorgeeks.com/download5223.html to remove these extra unneeded apps. I'm not sure if it runs with Vista tho'... be sure to check it out before running it....

hd2k

 

This is my first computer build, and I have only installed the programs that I use which at this point are mostly antivirus and antispyware programs taking up a total of about 11GB on the 250GB hard drive. I did see the starup programs load instantaneously on 2 separate occasions, but then other than that, it is always about 50 seconds. I thought defrag and antivirus scans would occur more quickly than they do.

 

Since I only have a few programs installed, it is a new system, and it has fast components and enough memory (1GB) I don't see how it could take that long for all of the programs to load at startup. I saw all programs load instantaneously on 2 separate startups, but then it has always been slow. Could this be an issue with the motherboard or some other hardware issue?
Matt