vista boot up

[rb_daman]

Hey guys,
I've been getting pretty annoyed with my laptop recently cos it takes well over a minute to load up. it all seems fine until the windows welcome screen (the screen just before the desktop shows up) after which it takes abuot a minute on it's own before windows finally loads up. i used to have 1GB ram, but i upgraded it to 3GB, and i also thought, let's be thorough, so i also restored my laptop to factory settings. it started to take this long after i installed avg, but when i had norton on it, it was perfectly fine. i've used msconfig and reduced the number of applications that start during start-up, but i've have this delayed boot time both before and after the system reset. i figure it cannot be spyware/adware, because straight after the restoration, the laptop still took a while to load up.

any ideas what i could try next?

windows shows i have 3gb ram left, and i've also done a diagnostic test which seems fine. i've opened up my laptop and cleaned out my fan and i've only installed avast anti virus after the factory settings were loaded.

does restoring a computer to factory settings clean up the registry as well? do you think this may be the problem?

any help would be much appreciated. thanks for your time

Ravi

[renegade600]

check your antivirus and antispyware settings, are you running any type of scans at startup.

if you know the harddrives manufacturer, go to their website, download their harddrive diagnostic utility and run it to see if the drive is going bad.

[jazz836062]

Originally Posted by rb_daman

does restoring a computer to factory settings clean up the registry as well? do you think this may be the problem?
Ravi

Yes, but it completely wipes everything on your computer. Doing a factory image restore is just the same as resetting it back to the way it came out of the box.

[rb_daman]

Originally Posted by renegade600

check your antivirus and antispyware settings, are you running any type of scans at startup.

if you know the harddrives manufacturer, go to their website, download their harddrive diagnostic utility and run it to see if the drive is going bad.

Hello again, thank you for your knowledgeable advice!
Currently i've only installed Avast and used all the Windows security programs that comes with windows. i didnt want to bog my laptop down with heavy programs. i've checked my antivirus settings, and it doesn't perform any tests, but it does keep popping up with update options. also, i've taken your advice and consulted Fujitsu (my Harddrive manufacturer) and ran the diagnostic checks, but all the tests passed and everythign seems fine.

Do you think that maybe i should re-do the factory restore?

jst to confirm again, it's not slow to load once my desktop screen/start bar comes up, but the bit just before that when the screen goes black.

Thank you for your time and help, it is much appreciated!

Ravi