Windows 7 Loading Very Slow

Question

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.

Solution 1

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.

Solution 2

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.

Comments

[Sasha Chedygov]

If the hard drive were overheating, you'd be experiencing more severe problems than this, so cross heat off the list of suspects.

[Alan B]

Is it slow in Safe Mode ?

[Adnan]

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?

[Tamara Wijsman]

Warning: Be careful with Autoruns, think twice before you disable something or you might break your windows!

[jdehaan]

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

[lupus137]

Are you guys serious? This problem is caused by a BACKGROUND IMAGE!?!? Wtf man...