This is a problem near and dear to my heart. I rarely test PCs and laptops anymore simply because it takes too long. Back when I worked at Laptop Magazine, the #3 best-selling tech magazine in the Honolulu airport, I had the pleasure of unboxing, starting up, and testing hundreds of models and every time I tried to run my tests I had to uninstall reams and reams of veritable crap. It was one of the reasons I went to OS X. What’s that you say? Mossberg writing about PCs without slipping a little Apple love into the scene? Fear not:
I also was shocked at how long this machine took to restart and to do a cold start after being completely shut down. Restarting took over three minutes, and a cold start took more than two minutes. That suggests the computer is loading a bunch of stuff I neither know about nor want. By contrast, a brand new Apple MacBook laptop, under the same test conditions, restarted in 34 seconds and did a cold start in 29 seconds.
Speak the truth, Mr. Mossberg. This has been an issue for years — a fairly new ultralight I have here running XP takes a good 5 minutes to book and 5 minutes to exit hibernation, which is absolutely unacceptable. Whine, fanboy, whine, you say, but it’s absolutely true.
Using Even New PCs Is Ruined by a Tangle Of Trial Programs, Ads [WSJ]
My XP side takes 12 minutes or so to start up, and sometimes didn’t shut down. Ubuntu has saved my and Bill Gate’s life (I was getting a bit crazed at the end there).
It is true that pc companies are shooting themselves in the foot with this absurd nonsense. I thought MS was going to try and crack down on that. This is one reason why I still have a desktop so I can build it and don’t anything on it I don’t want. Still my xp lappie boots just as fast as my macbook but there is nothing starting up.
What’s also unacceptable however is that you wouldn’t Run > msconfig and shutdown all the crap you’ve or your oem has installed. 12 minutes is staggering. I’d say you have a virus or trojan.
I have to agree with Danny. I recently made the switch to Apple due to frustrations with Windows, but I never had a problem with restarting or a cold start; msconfig allows you to kill a lot of the useless processes.
The thing that really drove me nuts was the fact that certain programs will reinstall themselves as services if you run them after disabling the “Run at Startup” or whatever they call the option in msconfig.
No Virus/trojan. I had two scanners (McAfee (which saved my a** a few good times) and AVG. Around 7 spyware/adaware scanners. I never ran anything without scanning it. Either way, who cares? Whether or not it was a problem caused by XP degrading or a virus, it is still Microsoft’s fault.
@Sean. strike one: mcafee. strike two: 7 malware scanners.
toss mcafee and stick with avg, use small AV programs like clamwin or drwebfree cureit for secondary virus scans.
the malware scanners, use just ONE, like ad-aware or avg antispy. drwebfree cureit has some malware scanning in it too.(if one of those malware scanners is webroot spysweeper, “kill it with fire!”)