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.
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