Hello,

I have been using Win2K8 for about 4 months now. Startup process is now longer than what it used to be lets say 3 months and shutdown process is not that bad. The difference back then to now is 2 softwares which I know for sure is not the cause (tested by uninstalling it).

How to troubleshoot or improve the performance?

Thanks,
Kris
DELL D820
4GB RAM
64bit Win2K8 Ent
100GB HDD ~=28GB free

It is a common problem in all Windows versions that after a while your system runs slower for some reason. A possible cause of this are the programs and services that automatically start up. You can cleanup / tweak services using the Fine-Tuning Services page in the Manual. To cleanup all autostart programs use the Sysinternals Autoruns tool.

Hope this speeds-up your system a bit!

Thanks for the reply.

I have already implemented Services Tuning.

http://www.defraggler.com/
http://www.ccleaner.com/
http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt/

Defraggler - Awesome little defrag tool
CCleaner - The ONLY worthwhile "Crap Cleaner" for your system
NTREGOPT - The NT Registry Optimizer defragments and consolidates your registry hive

I highly recommend these three programs to anyone! Peace!


EDIT: On that last one, he also has another software called ERUNT which is effectively a replacement for System Restore. However, I have NOT tested it on 2008. I am considering giving it a go, and making an advanced installer/frontend for it to allow running it from a USB stick at startup [via a cut-down OS to restore unbootable system] and to support user files and/or drivers if needed, etcetera. But no timeframe for this, more important things to worry about

I'll give it a try.

But do you think its 'coz of fragmentation in HDD and Reg?

....you are prorbably right, it could be driver errors. Check the "Event viewer" > "Custom Views" > "Administrative Events" and share with us any entries that have either level...

[!] Warning
[!] Error

...in the list. Usuaully, there are always some in there. Many can be safely ignored, and many wont need to be fixed. But something in there could give us a hint.

Here are few:

Warnings:

The speed of processor 0 is being limited by system firmware. The processor has been in this reduced performance state for 71 seconds since the last report.

The ICS_IPV6 was unable to allocate  bytes of memory. This may indicate that the system is low on virtual memory, or that the memory manager has encountered an internal error.


Errors:

The ICS_IPV6 failed to configure IPv6 stack.

Unable to initialize the security package Kerberos for server side authentication. The data field contains the error number.

Driver DLACDBHE.SYS has been blocked from loading.

mostly repeated issues.

Everything except for one seems pretty normal / common. The one thing imconcerned about though...

DLACDBHE.sys

...is part of a Roxio software product, namely Disk Imaging. Sometimes when drivers fail to load it has been known to add literally minutes to startup time. However, that is Windows XP, it this is a BLOCKED driver, not a FAILING one so i'm not too sure on that.

From my experience, every bit of Roxio software has slowed down my PC. That was a year or two ago since I tried any Roxio software though, but I'm not the only one who think they create sub-par quality software! If you could be bothered stuffing around, my I suggest an experiment to uninstall all Roxio software and see if it remedies the problem?

Also, I have noticed that on Vista/2008 my computer in particular is very picky about Security/AV software. Kasperskey, McAfee, Norton, BitDefender, Trend and avast! all latest versions caused my PC to load 30+ seconds slower and the general responsiveness of the UI was noticably worse. NOD32 is what I'm trying now and after a week i'm very impressed with the minimal performance impact its had on this ancient, low-powered PC.

What sort of hardware do you have? In particular HDD and RAM - 100GB HDD is an odd number do you know if it is SATA or SATAII and what the cache is [8MB at least for Vista/2008, 16MB helps] and i assume it is DDR2 RAM... DDR2 @ 667MHz and slow timings like 7-7-7-9 will be uncomfortable.