Sony Vaio VPCSB190X taking too much time to startup.

[Rajni-Robot]

I have a Sony Vaio, with Win7 Home Premium 64-bit Service Pack 1 installed on it. Till recent times, it used to take 2 minutes to start up which was obviously not very fine. But, recently it has become worse by taking more than 5 min to just start up. This is not desirable to any computer user. Is there anything that can be done about this, to at least reduce it to the previous state? Awaiting replies, I can count on.

[Samaria]

This sounds like a clear case of corrupt hard disk. The OS is taking time to load itself and other programs, that is what is causing your pre-mentioned issue of delayed start up. Please run check disk and other hardware corruption-detection utilities and check out. My Sony Vaio never takes more than 16 seconds to complete the full boot up, counting from the very second the button is pressed. Also, monitor the activities during boot up.

[Rajni-Robot]

I performed the hard drive check with native as well as 3rd party utilities and you’ll be glad and surprised to know there’s not a single issue reported with it. It seems perfectly fine. I even happened to monitor the activities during boot up and I couldn’t sense anything susceptible in that too. It read the usage of CPU ranging from 5% to 40% and the memory usage was something below 1GB.

There’s nothing to suspect about this right? At least I hope so, what do you think?

[Samaria]

Yes! There’s nothing really susceptible about this. It’s all fine and perfect and you should definitely celebrate about the fact that your hard disk is fine. Having said that, our question still remains who or what is acting the culprit in the story.
Anyways, I think you should once try booting up in the safe mode.
Another thing, wanted to ask you is have all other programs that you try to load have started showing delay or the issue resides with start up only. I would also want you to try disabling all your network connections during boot up and check if things change.

[Sasuke Uchiha]

That’s a good set of instructions; apart from this I want you to do something else too, just as a type of analysis.
* Check if the network booting options is enabled in BIOS if yes, disable it.
* Try tracing any issue with hard disk controller in device manager. There is an unavoidable possibility of it getting disturbed and starting to run under PIO mode. Perform the following actions on it:

- Uninstall the hard disk controller.
- Reboot the system
- let it install the driver again
- Reboot the system again

Sometimes, the issue is all because of hard disk’s attempt to establish a connection which delays all other tasks as it is queued among all other tasks. To verify this, you can check if the Hard Disk activity light remains lit for long.

[Anjan1990]

Try using CCleaner or any such memory releasing utility. It helps in improving the system performance by solving issues of delayed startups and program loading.

[Rajni-Robot]

I am thankful for all the suggestions, recommendations and advices. I did all the above analysis tactics and discovered that all my tasks were actually running very slow. I finally took this extreme decision of reinstalling the OS. I did so and after I installed all the programs back, the performance has tremendously increased.

However, what exactly was the issue still remains a mystery. Now that things are perfectly fine I have decided to create an image using Acronis so as to avoid such kind of situation again.

I would again like to thank all co-posters for their super-kind gesture!