Dell Inspiron 9400 slow start-up and shutdown

To be honest, I am not a fan of Dell. In my opinion, companies who find it necessary to spam people that have never had anything to do with them, in order to drum up business, are not to be trusted with my money. Dell spammed me for 2 years several years ago and it wasn’t until I finally called their head office in the US telling them to tell their German importers to stop (German companies often spam Swiss people) otherwise I would take drastic measures, that they finally stopped.

But our son-in-law, bless him, is a fan of Dell and when my husband decided that he wanted a laptop - the first computer he’d ever owned – our son-in-law recommended a Dell and we ordered one.

At this point, I must add that I also have a laptop (besides normally using my PC). I have a Toshiba Satellite, bought unseen in an emergency situation (I was going to France and my Sony had given up the ghost after I tried upgrading it from Win98 to XP) from “Top D” Biel. My Toshiba has XP on it (the only conditions I set Top D were XP and WiFi). I LOVE my Toshiba. It’s fast, beautiful, has connectors for about everything (except camera memory cards but that’s no problem as I have a little USB Hama card reader).

Anyway, on 24th April 2007 my husband’s Dell arrived, very pretty, but with Vista on it. It took absolutely AGES to start up – I timed it. It took over 10 minutes for everything to be loaded and ready to go. Disabling that stupid, stupid “widget” sidebar knocked nearly 2 minutes off the startup time and getting rid of McCaffey AV and replacing it with AGV reduced the startup time to just over 5 minutes. A restart would take 10 minutes. 5 minutes for “shutting down” and 5 minutes to start up.

Then he started getting error messages about Roxio.. I found out that this was part of the bloatware which Dell put on their PCs. Thanks to very useful information on another wordpress blogger:

http://teknobabble.wordpress.com/2007/08/27/removal-of-roxio-software-from-dell-vista-system-%E2%80%93-probably-a-good-idea/

I was able completely remove the damn thing yesterday and the startup today took about 2 minutes. So many thanks to teknobabble!