My one year old Vista installation at work takes some 10 minutes to start up. However, my freshly installed Vista at home takes only 1 minute to get fully running. What could cause this slowdown, and more importantly, how can I pinpoint the cause(s)? Are there tools available that can help?
Hardware used: the Vista booting slowly runs on better hardware: 4GB RAM + quad core 2.4GHz processor + slightly newer mainboard vs. 2GB RAM + single core 2.4Ghz. Vista's Aero is disabled on both installations (because I like the Windows 2000 look and feel :-).
The thing is: every version of Windows starts up very fast when just installed, but it slows down considerably after using it for a while. My guess is that this is caused by installing+uninstalling a lot of software, leaving a lot of .DLLs being loaded unnecessarily.