Vista - How to troubleshoot CPU/Disk spikes?

I have narrowed down my serious start up degradation on a Gateway ML3109 to spiking CPU and Disk activity as I start up and do almost anything on the notebook. Something is making various services, apps and drivers throw up errors about taking too long to start-up and shutdown. I thought I had narrowed it further to Sound drivers but updating and repeated reinstalls only reduced the sound-related errors. I'm almost sure this is hardware because I have done two clean reinstalls of just the Vista Basic system and it doesn't change. I thought it could be the generic drivers Vista's install disk uses, so I replaced every driver I could find on gateway's website for my model (only chipset wouldn't download, saying my system didn't "meet minimum requirements" even though it was downloaded from Gateway for my serial number) but the result is just fewer errors at each startup, or shutdown, in the Performance-Diagnostics>Operational log accessed on the Advanced Tools panel. These errors (sometimes Critical) are for different services/apps/drivers each time although Management Console, Prefetch, Error Reporting, Volume Shadow Service, Sound (including PCI slot, driver, and service) are frequent offenders. The startup and shutdown time are about 3 minutes each, up from 20 seconds previously. It is the critical error on each startup (degradation error 100) that bothers me.

Can someone tell me the exact procedure to troubleshoot these as I watch the performance graphs spike for CPU, hard disk, Memory? By the time I get to the log after startup, it is too late, but the spikes continue anyway even though no additonal errors are thrown up except at startup and shutdown. The error log in Administrative View is clean. I have no viruses, now or previously. I run no startup programs except Avast. I keep it CCleaned and Auslogics Defragged daily. Thanks.

Try resintalling again and *not* CCleaning, and see if your results persist.

I will certainly do another reinstall if you think that can solve this but I need to ask what about CCleaner could corrupt a newly installed OS? I remember doing the CCLeaner and Auslogics defrag right after I installed SP1 from disk, but I believe the logging of startup delay errors had already begun before that. I was trusting the CCleaner based on hundreds of reviews without one complaint, as with the Auslogics defraggers.

I ran autoruns and have a LXCSF driver at logon which I had set to Manual in services and removed from startup in the Windows Defender Software Explorer. It is software for my Lexmark cheapo printer which is buggy but needed in order to get the driver.

I have also enabled boot logging but need to know where and how to view it.

So you installed Vista and before you could grab the SP1 disc you started getting errors? Did you install anything in between Vista and SP1, or was it immediate?

It was immediate which makes me think that the generic drivers provided with the VISTA install disk (not Gateway recovery disks which I don't use to avoid bloatware) are causing the errors. I took as many drivers as were provided off of the Gateway site for my model and serial number, plus reinstalled the audio driver since audio errors were most common. The boot log showed a network driver failing to load so I went into safe mode and did sfc /scannow. Now things have simmered down to just Warnings for Events 100 and 200 Startup and Shutdown are about half as long as they were and no additional cascading errors for services/apps/drivers taking too long to startup/shutdown. My graphs are also not spiking and the heat feels a lot less, as though it has resolved most of the problem. I wonder if it could have been a combination of things like sound and network drivers, prefetching running out of control with new install (repeated prefetch errors). I also learned that this cheap Gateway ML3109 with Celeron M is lucky to run Vista well at all, even with a gig of memtested ram.

Could you list all the drivers you installed along with the chipset you're using? Also, are you using a clean Vista DVD or one provided by Gateway that also contains their software?