VERY slow startup.

Hi all.
When I boot my desktop takes an age to load.
Two icons, intellimouse and mighty fax, take ages to appear as icons and not files. The task bar is devoid of the clock, start button etc.
The hard drive has a good old grind, things appear and the hard drive grinds again and hey presto all is fine.
I got processes up during the last bit of loading and explore.exe is using up to 99% of the cpu.
It seems that this started happening after I installed the latest version of media player?? Could just be a coincidence though.
Any clues??
Cheers confused

 

An update.
I have run disk defragmenter.
It told me the disk needed doing.
There are many files still fragmented and when i run analyze it tells me that the disk still needs defragmenting. I run it again and the same files stay fragmented?
Is it time to format??

 

I guess your HDD might be going bad or has bad sectors. Or might have corrupted files.
But since you have doubts about media player updates and some other startup programs, why not try disabling them first?
Go to msconfig and start disabling some of the startup items. See if any of them makes any difference and you'll have more clear idea.

Good luck!

 

thanks for the reply pari.
I have already gone the startup route and disabled as much as i can.
No difference at all.
I have done a full virus scan, nothing.
Perhaps i have too much cr*p on here.

 

No but i will now.
Thanks for the suggestion.

 

Nope, that hasn't changed anything, all seems fine there.
I still have large fragmented clumps in disk defrag and grinding hard drives at start up.??????? confused

 

couple of questions:

Have you eliminated any trojans or malware? Try running this nifty program:

http://www.tune-up.com/2007 version

It's an amazing program that someone told me to use. Use it to check for malware, errors, registry errors, etc.


Also, how much RAM do you have? Your RAM could be bad.

 

sobeit, I used to have the same problem with defrag in that even after defragging I still needed to do it. The advice that worked for me was that for a defrag to be effective you need a fair chink of free space.

I think my 120gb HDD needed around 30gb free space for the defrage to become effective.

Once I deleted some crap and freeded up the space my defrag worked much better and it didnt say I needed to do it again.

 

Wierd this one.
Rudyard, tried cleaning up a bit and a few more files were defragged but still loads fragged. I have over 40gb of free space on the cdrive.

Evan, downloaded the util but not used it yet. Thing is, on start up it seems that it is acting wierd with things put on the comp from a few days ago.

Any NEW desktop icons are not appearing as icons straight away.
The ccleaner shortcut used to load straight away until i updated to the latest version tonight, now that updated shortcut takes ages to load as does the Tune Up programme icon which is new.
All shortcuts and folders that have been on the desktop for months are unafected. What goes on here then?? confused :cry

 

Tried the suggestions and also tried IObit smart defrag.
This can't defrag my drive fully either.
Is it dying??

 

This is a different thing, but I suggest you read this:http://www.dellcommunity.com/suppor...other&message.id=23955&query.id=168872#M23955

 

Thanks for that ped, i will check that out.
Although my desktop is loading ok now after using Advanced Window Cleaning util as suggested by zbd21 below.
It did a very comprehensive job of cleaning muck out and sorting the registry.
It's just the fragged files that are the problem now.
I may format the drive and if it's still slow after that try a new drive, at the price they are now I may just get one anyway.