David's Blog

I noticed that my boot up time had increased significantly and I didn't know why. I don't reboot very often, so it's not a big deal, but I was curious what was slowing things down.

Until recently, I could boot Vista in 28 seconds. Now it is taking me about 85 seconds to boot.

Shutdown was taking longer as well.

Vista tracks your systems performance and will generate errors and warnings when something is not performing as it should. To see what your status is, go to:

Start->Control Panel->System and Maintenance->Performance Information and Tools->Advanced tools->View performance details in Event Log

Sure enough, I had critical and warning performance events in my boot up...

I did a search on "Event 100" and found this post that suggested it could be an external USB hard drive issue.

I unplugged my external hard drive and rebooted.

My boot time dropped back to 28 seconds!

In searching the net for this issue, I noticed many references to Western Digital My Book's, which is exactly what I have. I wondered if this was an external USB hard drive issue or a *Western Digital* external USB hard drive issue.

So I plugged in my older/smaller capacity Maxtor external USB hard drive and rebooted.

My boot time stayed at 28 seconds. I checked the event log and I was no longer getting critical or warning performance events at boot up.

It looks like this is a Western Digital external USB hard drive issue.

I ordered a new 750 GB Maxtor external USB hard drive today to replace the Western Digital.

My advice to you: stay away from the Western Digital external USB hard drives!

Technorati Tags: Vista, Boot Time, Performance, Western Digital, Maxtor, My Book

Posted on February 9, 2008 5:42 PM | Permalink| Comments (1)