win7 pauses randomly when starting up

I have windows 7 on the intel SSD. Usually, from pressing the power button, it takes about 10 seconds to pass the bois, windows boot, and make it to the log in screen.

However, almost randomly, during the windows boot where the windows logo pulses, the system will just sit there and do nothing for about a minute straight, then finally resume starting up.

What's with this?

^Doesn't that only affect after you log in (Where you can see your desktop)?

So far I don't see a difference. The lag only happens like one out of 20 times.

lulz, this computer is so fast that having it start up with steam, winamp, aim, etc doesn't even make a difference vs not. I've already optimized my services and start up programs.


When I first noticed this lag happening during the windows pulse screen, I thought it was due to hibernating before I shut down. But I ruled that out because it doesn't do it 100% of the time when I hibernated. Then I thought it was because of windows update, but I can shut down with an update too and it will start up normally. The lag seems completely random.

Well that didn't work. In fact, now it seems to do it on an even more frequent basis!

Oh God, more crap now.

I did check disk and I think it went okay. It started and finished so fast that I barley had time to see if there even were results (40 gig intel ssd).

Then when I started up today, bios restarted itself several times. It kept going to the screen where it identifies the cpu etc, but much, much slower than usual, then leading to a blank screen and starting over again. Finally, it got to to widows. I started using the computer then it straight up froze, which has never happened before. I checked my evga board and the cpu temp was 25 degrees. There was activity with my secondary hard drive, which only had steam installed on it which was running in tray, but I didn't have it open or doing anything. I waited like 10 minutes and everything was still frozen except for the random activity with the secondary hard drive (I could tell because it is a raptor and they are loud). I had to hit the reset button.

Again, the bios was slow, but did not reset itself this time. Something I noticed was that it took a very long time to identify the ram and said the number was something like 1435. I believe that number is supposed to be 1600, but normally that screen flashes so fast that I don't pay attention. Maybe one of my ram sticks is bad?

today it started up perfectly. Cpu-z says I still have the overclock. 3812 MHz

And again today. I have no idea what is causing this. Updating the disc drive did nothing. It does it with or without a disc in the drive.There is no SD card in the reader so it isn't that. I start up with very few services and programs. I never disabled any MS services, just set them to manual, and only ones based on a guide I read on the web.

I think I will call DS.

I figured it out! It was the sata controller in device manager. DS may or may not have run the intel install software for the SSD. It doesn't matter because it doesn't do crap.

I downloaded the software from the intel SSD site. It was named Rapid storage something or rather. When you run that, all it does is install this worthless program and doesn't install the drivers you need. What you need to do is take the installer and extract it with 7-zip. Then go to device manager, ata controllers, find which device is the SSD and manually point it to the x64 folder of the thing you just extracted. Then that device will have Intel drivers instead of the default Microsoft ones.

After doing this, I have had perfect start ups every time and have noticed generally better performance from the drive. 

Experimentation is how you learn!