Very slow Vista boot - sometimes

I have a Dell Precision M6300 with Vista Business. The computer has 4GB RAM, and a fast 320GB hard drive. When I am at work, the computer boots reasonably quickly. When I have the computer at home, after I do Ctrl-Alt-Delete, there is a pause of several minutes, up to 5 minutes, when I just have a blank screen, then my desktop finally appears.

I have tried it at home wireless on, then I turned it off and booted, to see if wireless was the culprit. No dice, very slow either way. I then hard-wired it - same deal. When I ring it back to work there is no delay.

I read through the other "slow boot" threads but most of them were a consistent slow boot at all times; mine is just when not connected to the business LAN.

Any ideas? Thanks!

You might want to try disabling programs in the startup. Try disabling them one at a time to see if one of those programs is the culprit. Run msconfig command and then edit the startup in the satrtup tab.

when it starts up it takes sometime to actually run because the sidebar has a few gadgets on it which requires the internet. If you are not connected to internet at home then you should disable them from start up.

Have you updated the BIOS to the latest version?

Delays in booting can indicate some issue with installing drivers. A BIOS update sometimes addresses such an issue.

Most of the application running at startup make the pc slow down. You must stop unwanted application to do so.

you can open Control Panel, and then type "startup" into the search box. The link for "Stop a program from running at startup" shows up immediately. Now you can see the Windows Defender screen that lets you manage the startup programs.

You can choose to Remove or just Disable any startup item using this panel, as well as lots of other useful information so that you can see what each item is.

I should have mentioned that I have already disabled anything that I could find in startup that wasn't necessary, as well as disabling any services that I could identify as not essential. However, like I said in my original post, the computer boots quickly when I am in the office, but I get the approx 5 minute delay after the Ctrl-Alt-Del screen when at home. That leads me to believe that the problem is not with startup programs or services; if that was the case, I would expect it to be slow booting when at the office also.

At home, the computer is connected to the Internet before I start up. I have tried it wirelessly and also hard wired. Same deal.