Loading the Desktop (Vista / Win7)

[Dario D.]

I've been wondering about this...

 

[devil22]

takes about 1, maybe 2 seconds after I hit enter after enterring my password to get a usable desktop. I have startup items at a minimum, I don't install a lot of crap. In Win 7 x64 btw. Probably just depends on how much crap you install that auto-loads, and relevant system component speed (cpu, disk, ram size).

 

[DeaconFrost]

Why are people so hung up on this? I could see if took an unusually long time and you wanted to trouble shoot, but honestly, what difference does it make whether you get a usable desktop in 1 second or 15? Or even 20? How often do you log in to your computer that this cuts down on your productivity? Wouldn't it be a better usage of time to worry about how the system runs once you do log in? I recall threads on here where people were choosing their OS based on boot times. I just don't understand it.

 

[bigchieftaco]

I just turn the comp on and don't worry about stupid passwords, seems to boot faster without having to type in that stuff

 

[DeaconFrost]

If you don't have a password on your primary account, you better have one on the admin account and have it enabled. Many malware infections look for accounts with no passwords, and assign random ones. It's a great way to have your system hijacked.

 

[k1pp3r]

1-5 seconds after password, i love my SSD

 

[JimmiG]

It takes way longer on my desktop system than on my laptop, even though I keep startup programs to a minimum on both. At least 1-2 minutes after login on my desktop, 10-15 seconds on the lappy.

 

[phide]

Why are people so hung up on this? I could see if took an unusually long time and you wanted to trouble shoot, but honestly, what difference does it make whether you get a usable desktop in 1 second or 15? Or even 20?

The difference is either 14 or 19 seconds. I shut down my machine nightly and boot it daily, and the initial hard drive thrashing on log in is fairly annoying. For what it's worth, my underwhelming little Mac mini doesn't do this -- it's ready to rock as soon as I log in (there's some slight bogging down for a few seconds, but nothing substantial), yet my i7-powered monster rig acts like a Pentium II in the first 30-40 seconds after log in. XP didn't seem quite as bad.

Primarily, the main offender is MSE, but the indexing service (and assumably other core services) also thrashes pretty heavily, and it does seem to be getting significantly worse as time goes on despite all drives being defragmented on a weekly basis.

My startup is reasonably clean. There's the X-Fi tray applet, which is very small and loads quickly, the SugarSync manager, MSE and Cobian Backup 10. Nothing wild.

 

[SmokeRngs]

Why are people so hung up on this? I could see if took an unusually long time and you wanted to trouble shoot, but honestly, what difference does it make whether you get a usable desktop in 1 second or 15? Or even 20? How often do you log in to your computer that this cuts down on your productivity? Wouldn't it be a better usage of time to worry about how the system runs once you do log in? I recall threads on here where people were choosing their OS based on boot times. I just don't understand it.

Normally, I don't care especially since I reboot as little as possible but the fucking 1-2 minute wait for a usable desktop in Vista is beyond annoying. The goddamn overly ambitious superfetch in Vista is a severe pain in my ass at startup. I really wish I had the money for a copy of Win7 since MS tweaked and fixed superfetch so it wasn't so damn annoying on startup.

 

[gimp]

my new build loads in less than 5 seconds.
not even an SSD

 

[xxEIEIOxx]

I'm calling it longer than 30 seconds, but I have a LOT of stuff that loads at startup.