What's hogging my machine for so long on startup?

[Hansika]

When I power on my laptop, it takes about 14 seconds to go from splash screen to desktop. But then it takes about 3 minutes before I can do anything. By that I mean the "hard drive status light" stays solid green or flickers very rapidly as to appear almost a solid green. This usually means that something is reading or writing data, no? As long as the status light is lit, I can move my cursor around the screen but I can't access any of the shortcuts, start button, etc. I can't even access task manager or process explorer to find out what's using up my CPU. I suspect it's my antivirus and/or antispyware checking for automatic updates but by the time I CAN access TM or PE, the offending program has completed whatever it was doing and System Idle Process is showing 99%.

Any ideas on how I can force open TM or PE under those circumstances to verify what that resource hog really is?

[ua549]

Check the configuration of your anti-virus program. It is probably doing a scan of your drive each time it starts. A check for an update only takes seconds not minutes.

You can have Task Manager run at startup by adding it to the startup folder.

[jetebhinvo]

In addition to adding Process Explorer to the startup folder, you could analyze what is going on (after bootup) with Autoruns (also from Sysinternals).

If PE or TM doesn't come up fast enough, you might be able to get it up sooner by moving it, perhaps into the HKLM "run" key or perhaps putting it in a startup script for the local group policy, or try making it a scheduled task.

Did you try using the "boot logging" function of Procmon (from Sysinternals)? It says "Process Monitor's driver will log activity at the next boot into a file in the %Windir% directory and will continue logging through the shutdown or until you run Process Monitor again. "

[JPnyc]

is that the same company that makes rootkit revealer?

[ua549]

It's the same people, SysInternals. Their company was bought by Microsoft a couple of years back.