Windows 7 Slow Welcome Screen and Unresponsive Desktop

By BoneyardBrew
in Microsoft (Windows)

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BoneyardBrew Member

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The O.P. also said he did a fresh install and got the problem - so we've ruled out ANY external application.

SATA drivers (unlikely) or hard drives are the only remaining thing that could produce this sort of problem.

It's also NOT related to the page file, moving it to another drive is going to achieve nothing, or degrade performance in many cases.

BB:

That's normal, services are starting and getting ready for use. (Indexing, Superfetch, etc).

In your device manager - what IDE controllers do you have listed?

They'll have the SATA controllers there, i'll let you know which driver/s you may need, if any.

I just updated my chipset drivers, and didn't take notice if it updated the following. I still need to try swapping out those drives, I just wanted to make sure it wasn't anything relating to software or drivers first.

Intel® 82801G (ICH7 Family) Ultra ATA Storage Controllers - 27DF

Intel® 82801GB/GR/GH (ICH7 Family) Serial ATA Storage Controller - 27C0

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BoneyardBrew Member

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Your SATA drivers are fine mate. They'll use the inbuilt ones from Windows 7 and do NOT require an update.

Good luck with that new drive load! :)

Well, I unplugged every other drive, DVD and CD included, and now my boot is much faster. I get about 24 seconds timing it with my iPod's stopwatch, and it's responsive the second it hits the desktop. I tried this 3 times just to make sure the test wasn't a fluke.

Now it's time to figure out which drive is the culprit. The oddest thing is that I remember doing this before and it made no difference.

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BoneyardBrew Member

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As I thought it was from day one! :p

Plug one device in at a time and see which one it is. My bet is on the Fujitsu (or was that Hitachi?) hard drive ;)

Hmm, oddly enough I plugged them all in one by one and it seems to be working properly.

Is it possible that it was booting slowly simply because it needed to be reconnected? That seems odd to me. I do know I did this at least once since this has been happening. I guess being this is a computer at all, you never know :p.

It seems to boot a few seconds more slowly with all of them connected compared to when only the boot drive is connected (27 seconds vs. 30 seconds). This time I tested it from the time it started booting until the time I was able to open a My Computer window, which previously acts unresponsively.

Is this time about normal for my system? I start timing it the second the boot flag animation begins to play. If you don't want to include the time with me opening the explorer window, it is about 25 seconds with one drive, and 27 seconds with everything.

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BoneyardBrew Member

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Sorry for the double post, it wouldn't let me edit my other one.

Turns out, it's booting slowly again, however that happened :huh:. So I'm very confused. I guess I'll need to try using the other drive after all, or disconnect the drives for longer than a day and see if that prevents it from happening.

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Soldiers33

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why has recently everyone been getting unresponsive desktops? Mine started being unresposive about 3 weeks ago, but I dont remember installing any updates so that cant be the cause. Gonna have to reinstall windows.

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BoneyardBrew Member

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It always seems that disconnecting all my other drives, including DVD and CD drives, remedies the problem.

This time, I am going to leave all of the other drives disconnected for a day or two (or until the problem reoccurs, whichever comes first) then I will start plugging everything in one by one and seeing for sure what is causing this.

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PurePhoenix

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I tried this, and the boot times were actually worse with the page file on a different drive.

If you've been putting it on a 5200 RPM drive, i'm not surprised!

If the 2nd hdd is very fragmented then i would still be surprised, but it's not impossible.

Either way (No offense intended to you!) i'm calling bull*** until i see it for myself.

I've done this to litterally hundreds of PC's and seen an increase.

If you're really getting slower boot times when putting the PF on another drive, that'd point more to a drive or HDD controller failure.

At the least severity it'd be a bug in the RTM W7 hdd controller for your chipset, and you need to install the official W7 chipset drivers from your manufactorer.

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BoneyardBrew Member

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Windows 7 has built in performance log which tells exactly what is causing delays at start up.

Where exactly do you find the logs for the boot?

Are your DVD/CD drives connected via IDE? If they are, see if either of them have Cable Select set instead of Master/Slave.

Yes, they are connected via IDE. I'm pretty sure they are set properly.

If you've been putting it on a 5200 RPM drive, i'm not surprised!

If the 2nd hdd is very fragmented then i would still be surprised, but it's not impossible.

Either way (No offense intended to you!) i'm calling bull*** until i see it for myself.

I've done this to litterally hundreds of PC's and seen an increase.

If you're really getting slower boot times when putting the PF on another drive, that'd point more to a drive or HDD controller failure.

At the least severity it'd be a bug in the RTM W7 hdd controller for your chipset, and you need to install the official W7 chipset drivers from your manufactorer.

I'll try it again and record some times for you. I'll make sure my drives aren't fragmented as well.

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BoneyardBrew Member

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I had this problem for about a week then it mysteriously went away. Something about caching?

I've been having this problem for a long time, so I don't think that's the case. It happens when I have a fresh load, as well as one weeks, or even months old.

I just timed my boot time with the page file on a different drive (not the 5400RPM one) with very low fragmentation and I receive the following times.

26 seconds to Desktop

10 seconds to Responsive Desktop

With the page file on a different drive my desktop still remains unresponsive, and the white file icons on the superbar still occur.

EDIT:

I just unplugged everything again and used just my boot drive. I swapped the cable out as well with another one, and put it in a different SATA port. It is now booting in about:

17 seconds to Welcome Screen

5/6 seconds to Desktop

3 seconds until Responsive Desktop

I am not going to test a few more things, like changing it to a different SATA port, putting the old cable back, etc. and see what was wrong.

Edited by BoneyardBrew
  • 9 months later...
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J400uk

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Was a fix ever discovered for this? Lots of people saying solid colour wallpapers cause it but I have a jpeg background. On the top PC in my sig so with an i7 and high speed SSD there really shouldnt be any performance lag. Boots up instantly in safe mode, but when you turn on normally it gets stuck at the welcome screen for up to 30 seconds after entering my password.

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ahhell

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I'm experiencing this lag too. If I reboot, my system seems to "hang" before I have a chance to enter my password.

I haven't tried fixing the issue yet but I did some research. Apparently, there are some driver issues with the ICH9 SATA controller that can cause the system to wait for a time out (you get Iastor timeouts in the eventlog).

New Intel drivers were supposed to fix the issue but it didn't for me.

I have a Velociraptor drive as my boot drive and there is supposedly a firmware update that corrects the error. I haven't tried it yet.

Whatever the problem/fix is, it's pretty damn annoying.

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J400uk

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Well, just in case anyone is still reading, I found in my case a dodgy installation of Kaspersky 2010 was causing the poor performance. After removing and updating to Kaspersky 2011 with default settings it seems to be performing super-fast again. I also found this article which discusses other causes of delay at the welcome screen - http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/itdojo/?p=1735

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