Ok, I'm a programmer for almost 30 years now. Though I still can't poinpoint this problem for a long time now. A very long time. This turned out to be a life-task.
Booting is sometimes slow. Very slow. Up to 3 minutes until the login screen is shown. No, no hardware is broken and there is no virus. During this time, my hard disc sounds like a sewing machine. Just look at the following representative example of what is happening. The picture says why it sounds this way:
So, the drive's head is contantly jumping between that "unknown" file and other files. Naturally this back and forth makes booting very slow. The question is: Why??? And why only sometimes? On good days, booting takes 22 seconds. On bad days, 3 minutes. I have no clue of an indication why.
Oh, this is with Win 7/64, SP1. After 3 years, I've completely reinstalled my machine to get rid of the problem as I didn't know any other solution. However, after a while, the problem was back. I do not see any relation to anything installed, not a driver, not a virus scanner, firewall or anything else. I've completely uninstalled the virus scanner which seemed to fix it, but after 3 days, the problem was back.
Often the problem was gone just when trying to pinpoint it with the WPT. Like that intrusive fly that suddenly disappears when you merely start thinking about a fly flap. At the moment, booting takes ~50 s. This is not good, but not bad enough to create a helpful trace.
Sometimes the line
Rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks
helps, sometimes it makes the situation worse. (I wonder why I have to execute the line manually at all?)
I've also tried installing this Hotfix (The Windows 7 startup process is slow when you create many restore points) but it didn't make a difference.
No, I won't buy a SSD to "solve" the problem because it just must not happen this way. BTW, it's a WD RE4 drive (1 TB) with one partition (C:). Anyway, the problem is not the drive itself as it also occured with a different drive before. It does not matter, it is a software problem. The fact that these accesses are logged, obviously says that it's not a drive problem anyway.
Not to mention I've already defraged the drive not only once. Not of much use after a fresh reinstall anyway.
Oh, it happened in safe mode, too.
So, any clue other than reinstall Windows once again?
Thank you.
Armin