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I've had a problem that only started to occur yesterday. When I boot into Windows 7 and log on to my user account, the computer gets very laggy and slow for at least 5 minutes. Icons take ages to load, and everything is rendered unclickable. This happens for about five minutes after which everything goes back to normal. I tried restarting a few times to see if this is a recurring problem, and it is. I ran a full system scan with Microsoft Security Essentials and found nothing wrong, and I also defragmented the disk to increase performance. However, the problem still exists.

Edit: For the past day, I've been trying to install Ubuntu on the same laptop. When installing it on a partition didn't work, I decided to use Wubi. Could this somehow be the problem? Also, my hard drive gets hot a lot, so could the heat be affecting the hard drive and maybe making it defective?

Any help on this issue would be greatly, greatly appreciated.

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    If the hard drive were overheating, you'd be experiencing more severe problems than this, so cross heat off the list of suspects.
    – Sasha Chedygov
    Dec 31, 2009 at 4:43
  • Is it slow in Safe Mode ?
    – Alan B
    Jan 19, 2011 at 6:22

8 Answers 8

Reset to default
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Microsoft knows about this.. its a bug that happens when you have a background other than a windows 7 one, ie the toshiba or hp ones that come preloaded or another non windows 7 backgrounds. they have known about this for quite a while and havent yet fixed it. I had the same problem. If you change it to a standard windows one it will load quickly. it threw me off too because i have the new i7 processor and it took forever to load.

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  • Actually, loading speed is probably more related to your harddrive than to your powerful cpu.
    – Gnoupi
    Apr 29, 2010 at 8:17
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    I can confirm this issue (seems incredible but true!), I faced it a few months ago I had no background image (only solid color) and was slow. Added a background image, problem away! +1
    – jdehaan
    Jun 27, 2010 at 10:46
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    Are you guys serious? This problem is caused by a BACKGROUND IMAGE!?!? Wtf man...
    – o01
    Oct 8, 2011 at 22:13
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I fixed my problem through fixing the hard disk. I used chkdsk /B on an elevated Command Prompt to mark off bad clusters.

My problem was with the event log file and index files; that explains why startup was slow. I will need a new hard disk soon, but it is the bad disk that caused all the problems. If an image file used as a background caused the slowness, it might be because the clusters containing the image file is bad.

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Unplug all your USB devices (except keyboard and mouse I guess) and try again.

Run msconfig and uncheck anything you don't need or is suspicious.

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  • thanks, but this didn't really help. it still loads up really slow. i actually just installed ubuntu 9.10 using Wubi. Could this somehow be causing this?
    – Adnan
    Nov 18, 2009 at 20:53
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This could quite possibly be related to how old/slow your hard-drive is. I had an old crappy 80GB hard-drive plugged in with my Windows 7 computer and it REALLY effected load times, took it out, computer ran like a dream.

Just a suggestion, it could be a million things! :)

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Use System Restore to a time where you are confident that your computer was working smoothly

(type "system restore" into the start menu search box)

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Since it is happening during log in, there's a good chance there is something going on with your user profile. Try creating another test account, and seeing if the problem persists when logging in to that account.

If not, dig around in your profile to see if there is something going on - large files, lots of temp, etc. You can use Process Monitor from Sysinternals to help with this. It can show you what files are being accessed when logging in; set your account to auto-login, configure ProcMon to capture data on boot, and reboot. It will capture data through the login process.

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You mentioned that the hard drive gets hot - just wondering if you've had it serviced recently? I saved mine from disaster a week ago, getting it cleaned in nick of time. Fan had huge buildup of almost solid fluff that had been affecting performance for months, fan was working overtime to compensate and laptop was always hot. Now it's running like a dream machine again :)

Repair guy said you need to service at least once a year for all laptops. He also pointed out that on HP lappies, the fan exhaust from the CPU heats up the graphics chip which is right next to it, and on mine the thermal paste was totally dried up so I was lucky not to have a fried lappie. In contrast, Sony laptops have the CPU and graphics chips positioned furthest apart which avoids this potentially fatal problem.

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From what you said, I would think that Wubi is to blame if it is the only application you have installed recently. I have tried it a few times without problems but it could be to do with a combination of programs that you are running on your system.

Try looking at Microsoft/Sysinternals Autoruns and seeing if there is anything that can be disabled.

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  • Warning: Be careful with Autoruns, think twice before you disable something or you might break your windows!
    – Tamara Wijsman
    Jun 19, 2010 at 11:05

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