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I'm running Windows 7 on a Dell Studio 1535 laptop, normal midrange laptop specs. As of last night, whenever I start Windows, it makes it to the blue login screen at a normal pace, lets me enter my credentials, and then slows to a near-halt when I press login. If I wait a few minutes, it will make it to the desktop, at which point every single thing appears to happen at a glacial pace, forever. My computer continues to act like a 386 trying to run Windows 7 until I shut it off.

Task Manager, if I manage to open it and it stays open, doesn't show anything awry or any odd processes. Nothing unusual shows up in the Windows event log. I have almost nothing running at startup. My laptop's plugged in, the fan is running fine, I ran memtest and it came up fine. I have plenty of disk space. No peripherals are plugged in.

When I start in safe mode, I experience the same thing, except it's marginally more usable since safe mode is so lightweight. Still, exactly the same. Once in a while a program I open will just explode and throw up a "foo has stopped working" dialog, presumably due to the extreme lack of resources -- but what resources?

I have this Windows installation on a hard drive with Ubuntu on another partition, and I dual-boot them, but my setup in this regard has not changed for a while. It was still working fine last week after Tuesday Windows updates. I haven't done anything else strange that comes to mind.

Any ideas as to how to troubleshoot this that are easier than 'reinstall'?

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  • What's your wallpaper? I do believe win7 has... issues with the single-colour wallpapers.
    – Phoshi
    Feb 16, 2010 at 0:48
  • My wallpaper is a 1920x1200 JPG, but in safe mode, it's just black anyway, so I doubt that's the culprit.
    – user28385
    Feb 16, 2010 at 1:03
  • Does it run normally after it "settles down"? Is there builtin wireless? Any devices complaining in device manager?
    – SqlACID
    Feb 16, 2010 at 1:14
  • As far as I can tell, there is no "settling down". It stays in this semi-functional state for as long as I have patience to wait. It has built-in wireless, and it's configured to connect to my AP by default, but that, too, is disabled in safe mode. I'll check out Device Manager now which is a good and obvious idea.
    – user28385
    Feb 16, 2010 at 1:17
  • It looks like the only thing slightly off in Device Manager is that my IR port isn't loading its drivers properly. I don't remember whether it's always been that way (I forgot I even had one); in lieu of a better attempt I'll try disabling it. Everything else looks proper; my processor, graphics card, wireless, and the rest look to be recognized and drivers loaded just fine. (This is all testing in safe mode.)
    – user28385
    Feb 16, 2010 at 1:28

3 Answers 3

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Try the following:

  1. Click Windows + R to get to "Run Command"
  2. Type msconfig
  3. From the list, select "Selective Startup" and uncheck "Load startup items"

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  4. Click OK and restart
  5. If situation solved, go over the list of applications loaded at startup to find the culprit (use a tool like Autoruns)
  6. If that didn't help, go into msconfig again, and start removing services until you find the one.
  7. If all that didn't work, you may have a hardware problem (HD or memory)
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Can you uninstall Tuesday's windows update & give it another shot? In order to diagnose the issue you need to bring your machine to last good known working state & start from there.

This means undoing any changes to your system since last known good working state.

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I would bet on either a rootkit/malware, or a bad hard drive

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