Slow-Starting SL after Powering-Up Computer

Hello,

When I turn-on my computer and then launch SL it takes FOREVER for the SL login screen to appear. When I then exit SL, but leave the computer on, and then launch SL again, the login screen appears very quickly.

I have a feeling a setting needs to changed to allow SL to load quickly after starting-up my computer. True? If a setting is involved, I don't know where it is. Suggestions anyone?

Thanks,
Avanti

What is "forever"?

That SL launches quickly the second time implies that the first time around you're bottlenecked by hard drive/memory/bus speed. But if you're starting SL up literally RIGHT after booting the system, you may also be waiting on various background system processes and your network connection.

reduce cache size and regually defrag the cache disk

as said, starting sl right when you login to windows, the system is doing it`s proccessing startup wich usually takes a min or so

Thanks.

I would say "forever" is about four full minutes. Please note that no other websites are held-up like this, even when I go to them immediately after booting up my system.

Internet = Web!

I'm fairly certain that's not what you actually meant. Just be aware there's a lot more going on behind the scenes when you start up SL than loading the web-based login screen.

Also, you can skip loading the login screen by either picking 'AutoLogin' in the Debug menu, or by changing your desktop shortcut to use options...that...I can't remember right now. But that's off topic anyway!

Working in IT we get this type of complaint a lot... "email is slow, fix the server" ... well, they are trying to open Outlook before their PC is done doing its "business" and of course its going to be slow - they are just making it all worse by forcing even more multi-processing.

Give your PC some time. Vista especially is doing some "learning" when it boots up and can sometimes seem even slower than XP at first, but its all good.

Boot up, go get some coffee... and leave your PC on overnight (if thats what you are doing) rather than shutting it off (thats so 1990s..) As much as people pick on MS, I've found rebooting isn't required so much anymore as long as your drivers are all good.

I guess the best test then is bootup, let my computer sit for a while, then finally start SL--based on everyone's comments SL should then start up more quickly.

I thought I had done the above at one time or another, but had experienced the same result--but maybe I'm wrong.

I'll try it tonight and see what happens.

Thanks everyone,
Avanti.

Windows does a lot of caching of executable code if you have the memory available for it to do so. If you have already run SL and exit, then run it again soon thereafter, a lot of the executable code and probably some portion of your SL cache will still be in (fast) RAM and will not have to be read from (slow) disk. In addition to the above comments, this could explain the effects you are seeing.

Hello,

Here's an update:

Last night I cold-booted my computer, waited several minutes this time, and then launched SL. Now it loaded fairly quickly.

I found this "problem" kind of interesting. The extreme slowness of SL loading (if I launch SL immediately after cold-booting) is a new development. However, not that long ago I updated Vista, installed some stuff, etc., which probably started the problem. Also, after cold-booting, all appears "quiet" on screen, but obviously many things are still happening in the background, as others mentioned.

Thanks again to everyone for your comments and suggestions.

Avanti

Recent versions of Windows (XP and Vista, certainly, and perhaps also 2000) have a lot going on behind the scenes just after startup. On a typical setup a lot of background services are being launched (open up the Task Manager sometime and look at Processes to get an idea of just how much is running). The Disk Indexer (a background process that catalogs what is on your hard disk so you can do faster searches) is also likely to be running; watch your hard disk light, if you have one, and see if it is on most of the time right after startup. Because of that, ANY program starts slowly just after you restart Windows.

There is an additional factor that makes the second launching of SL faster. If your system has enough RAM, Windows will use some of it as a disk cache, saving the things you fetched from disk most recently. If you have 2GB or more RAM, there may be hundreds of megabytes of data in the cache. If you relaunch SL shortly after you ran it, the program and most of the things that it fetches from your disk cache are probably already in memory; that's useful when you have to relog and you don't want to wait forever.

Avanti, Vista is loaded with all sorts of unnecessary bells and whistles that don't do much more than bog down your entire computer-using experience. it's especially noticable in 2L. and even more noticeable if you try to open 2L while other programs are still loadig upon startup (as you alraedy have discovered).

is there any of these programs you can take out of the start-up menu and only open when you actually need to use them so your computer will boot up even faster?