I got a custom-built AMD Phenom II X3 710 system (2.6GHz, 8GB DDR2 RAM, no overclocking), Win 7 Ultimate x64. It's got a truly annoying boot up time. I measured with a stopwatch, and it took 2:08 minutes to boot from start to the user logon. But it doesn't stop there, even after getting into the user account, there is still further boot up going on, and the hard disk LED basically remains on full for 5 minutes (since boot) before we see it first flickering down. The system is somewhat heavily loaded with hardware, it's got 4 hard drives internally, and a couple of more externals attached via USB. The boot drive is a 1TB Hitachi SATA.
The same machine dual-boots into Ubuntu Linux in about 1:30 minutes flat from the same physical hard disk (different partition).
I've been lately trying to optimize the services, by changing some of the automatic startup items to the new "automatic (delayed start)" method, but it hasn't made much difference. In the event logs there are various warnings and errors that show up constantly during the boot process, which I think are relevant here:
- One warning is from Wininit, event 11, "Custom dynamic link libraries are being loaded for every application".
- One error is from Volsnap, event 25, "The shadow copies of volume C: were deleted because the shadow copy storage could not grow in time. Consider reducing the IO load on the system or choose a shadow copy storage volume that is not being shadow copied."
Can anyone explain these above two messages, and what I can do about them?