Vista random slow boots

I posted this on the Operating Systems section however i'm beginning to suspect the motherboard/bios may be involved in this problem, so i copied it and posted here.

Hello, i'm posting here as i've run out of ideas as to what could be the cause of this.

It started on friday morning, i turned on the computer and it took an abnormally long time to boot. Now, it has taken longer than usual to boot before, however the wait has always been as the windows scroll bar goes from left to right, at the black screen after POST but before you actually get into windows. This was different, it not only took a long time there, but when windows did start i got the "welcome" screen for a good 20~ seconds before the desktop would load up at all. I never thought anything of that, but i got worried when certain apps started to hang when i tried to use them. Media player hangs instantly, as soon as i try to load it. MSN Messenger also suffers, and IE hangs after loading my home page for a few seconds.

The first time it happened, i just restarted and windows booted normally - a normal boot for me is 3-4 runs of the windows scroll bar on the black screen i mentioned before, then a pretty much instant load of everything, with systray apps taking about 10 seconds for all of them to fully load. I forgot all about the 'bad boot' until the next time i restarted, when it happened again. This went on, and it seemed to be exactly every other boot was a 'bad' one. This is not a hardware/overclock problem, as i reset to stock settings and it still persisted. It seems to be a vista problem, i just can't identify it. I've tried using msconfig to disable all my startup programs, then i planned on turning them on one by one til i perhaps found an offending program, however even with all programs disabled the problem was still there. This wouldn't have made much sense either though since i haven't installed anything in the last few days, the only thing i remember recently was (9 i think) windows updates the other day, and i've tried using system restore to go to a point before they were installed and the bad boots still cropped up every other startup. I've since reinstalled those updates.

All of yesterday the behaviour seemed to be exactly every other boot would be a 'bad' one, however today i've had 5 normal boots in a row, followed by a bad one, so it's apparently random. Is there any kind of way i can analyze exactly what is going on when Vista is loading? I can't think for the life of me why it's not happening every boot if there is a problem with some application or some root file. I've tried sfc /scannow, it found no errors.

My hardware is as follows:

Blackops X48
QX9650
2x2gb corsair 1600mhz
9600GT
Coolermaster 1250w realpower pro
2 x 300gb velociraptor raid 0
500gb samsung storage

I'm on Vista Home Premium 64 with SP1 and all latest updates installed.

I made a video of an example of the bad boot and example of a normal boot

Bad boot

Note the time taken to boot up, windows media player hanging when i load it, and how long it takes to log off after i click restart.

Normal boot

This is the same restart following on from the previous vid, i had to split it to upload them.

Thanks for reading, any suggestions are welcome.

:UPDATE:

Still no luck finding the cause of this problem, though i may be onto something.

I decided to disable all windows services on startup, as well as all my startup programs. There were a handful of services it wouldn't let me disable, for example there's one where if you disable it you will be unable to log on, so they stayed on. I browsed the Event Viewer extensively but was unable to find anything pointing to a suspect. I used the task manager and performance monitor to try to see if there was something that was taking up alot of hard drive read/write, or memory, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. Extremely frustrating, i can understand the system being slow if something was for some reason taking up all 4gb of my ram but there is nothing like that going on.

The bad boots still came up from time to time, however i started noticing something - i'm pretty sure they're happening whenever i go into the bios, save changes and exit again. It doesn't even matter if i've changed something in the bios, if i even just go into it, then save + exit right away then wait for it to boot, this seems to be what triggers the bad boots. I'm on bios G28 for the Blackops and i understand there's a G29 out now, so i'll try flashing to that. I'll copy this to the foxconn section too.

:UPDATE 2:

Flashed to G29, no difference.

Have you updated your Intel Matrix Storage or chipset drivers recently? That's basically what started happening to me after upgrading to the latest Intel Matrix Storage driver (and i updated the intel chipset drivers at the same time, although not sure if thats related). I would get hangs in windows, at first it would take well over 1-2 mins to come back, then later it would just stop completely.

In the end reinstalling windows and sticking to the intel matrix/chipset drivers from the blackops cd fixed the problem for me, although reinstalling may not be completely necessary.

oh, actually, my post would only be relevant if you're using raid.

I forgot to add HD's to original post.

I am on raid 0, with two velociraptors.

I've not updated my raid drivers to my knowledge, unless they were somehow included in the windows update files, were you experiencing this exact behaviour with the startups etc?

I've just been trying to reinstall windows, but it completely hangs. After 10 minutes of "please wait" and selecting the "custom installation", it hangs indefinitely.

nah i never had a problem with startups, but windows would hang after any moderate burst of hd activity. what version of the intel matrix storage manager do you have on your system?

version 7.8.0.1013

hmm,thats the same version that i had to put back on to make mine work, so its probably unrelated. have you tried letting it run a scan of your array?

have seen this on my MARS also
uping the sb / pll volts fixed it

Turns out it was a faulty optical drive :clap:

Life 1, Xello 0.