New, odd problem with Vista SP1?

I just put another machine together this past week using a retail copy of Vista Ultimate 64 Bit with SP1 already integrated along with all the latest drivers for my hardware and the latest “March 08” DirectX update.

Boot up time is excessively long do to a problem I have not experienced with any of the release candidates. During boot up the screen goes black with a functioning cursor for about 20 seconds right before the desktop loads. Once into Windows everything is fine and system performance is excellent.

Any ideas, the specs on the machine are below.

ASUS RAMPAGE FORMULA (Intel X48 chipset) BIOS 401
Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 w/Thermalright Ultra-120 Extreme
OCZ Titanium XTC 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)
2x Western Digital Raptor 74GB (RAID 0)
EVGA 8800 Ultra “Superclocked” (175.16 drivers)
Creative X-Fi Fatal1ty
SILVERSTONE OP1000 1000W
SILVERSTONE TJ09-B

Hi DJT,

For that amount of time, it may be step 26 in this tutorial. You can turn this off to save waiting that amount of time at boot up.

Speed Up the Performance of Vista

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Shawn,

Thank you very much. When I set this motherboard up last week I completely overlooked that setting in BIOS. Changing the ACPI mode to S1 worked like a charm, booted right into Windows (very quickly actually) with no lag.

Thanks again.

Your welcome DJT, but I meant step 25 instead. LOL

S1 will only let your computer go into a light sleep state with the fans still running. S3 is for a deeper almost off quiet sleep state.

I'm glad to hear that it's working the way you wanted though.

Shawn

Shawn,

Go figure? Right after I changed the sleep state to BIOS to S1 it booted right into Windows without any delay. Now I get home and turn the machine back on and the 20 second delay is back again. I gave the S3 option in BIOS a try, but I get the same problem.

The step 25 “Speed Up the Shutdown Time” that you refer to does not seem to have anything to do with my problem, shut down is actually almost instantaneous on my machine.

You don’t happen to have any other ideas?

LOL DJT, I'm going crossed eyed or blind today.

Give step 24 a try on speeding up the boot time.

Well I gave that a try also, no luck, still the 20 second black screen with cursor before getting the desktop.

I might try a reformat tomorrow.

Hi djt,
Reformatting is not IMHO a solution for a problem, which i am sure will not disappear or at least will come back.
Vista has a very useful tool in the Event Viewer which allows you to see exactly how long (in ms) each process takes during the boot.
I wrote an article on this last year (unfortunately in french) but if necessary i can make a translation and add pics from my en-US mui.

I understand that reformatting is not a solution to the problem, I choose to do this as the only way I know to pin point what I thought was a driver issue.

Finally after taking a wild guess I unplugged my new Logitech G15 gamming keyboard, suspecting that it might be the culprit. I shut down and then plugged in a USB Cherry keyboard I had laying around. What do you know, no more boot up problems. A look over at the Logitech site revealed that there was a new driver for the G15 that remedies “delay during boot of Vista”. The driver doesn’t completely cut the boot-up delay but it does make a difference. It looks like Logitech is still developing better drivers for Vista and the G15, as the site mentions features that have been disabled until the next update.

DJT,

I'm glad to hear that you found the source of the problem. Thank you for the feedback on what it was.

Shawn