Laptop Loading Times is Extremely Long?

[anthonyla65]

Hey guys, I have a Dell Studio 1555 with T4200 + 2GB DDR2 800 RAM + 250GB Samsung HDD + Vista Home Prem. At first when I got my laptop in September 2009, boot times were extremely quick, less than 30 seconds maybe. But overtime, the boot time has extended to like 3~4 minutes. This is extremely annoying because my older laptop can boot faster than that with Windows 7 (Celeron 1.86GHz + 1GB RAM + 80GB HDD) and the transfer rate on the old laptop is slower aswell. I constantly defragg my hard drive so I don't see what makes it loads soo slow. I only have Xfire + Msn auto start + Avast. Nothing else really. I have 130GB free on that hard drive and I don't want to reformat I can load games at decent speed but its not consistent. Sometime I can load fast, sometimes its slow. Sometimes firefox loads instantly and sometimes it takes like 15~20 seconds. Yeah alot of sometimes . I'm sure my PC is clean and secure, Is there a way to speed up all this? I'm thinking of reformating to Windows 7 but I don't want the hassle. But if I have to, should I choose 64bit over 32bit?

[Carbon]

How much stuff is in Documents, Pictures, etc? Desktop? Is System Restore on? Is there anything in the event log?

I'd just switch to Win7 64-bit tbh, but you can probably track this down.

[anthonyla65]

About 150 files in Downloads, 20 pictures, 53 Documents. Not sure about system restore, I think its on. Maybe space consumption are Games. Really weird stuff.

[philthomas]

Have you looked in msconfig/startup to see what is loading at startup ?

if there'sloads in there, try disabling everything and reboot to see if this speeds things up. If so, add one back at a time, rebooting each time and try to identify the culprit.

[anthonyla65]

Hmmn quite some hassle, but I will try that when I have time. So does system restore have an effect aswell as carbon said?

[philthomas]

AFAIK system restore uses a fair bit of HDD space, but not sure if it affects startup or run times.