This may or may not be a problem. I have a brand new Dell XPS 9000. It has Window 7 64-bit Home Premium. It's about 3 weeks old. When I first got the system, upon powering up the system the screen that displays "start Windows" prior to the login screen, would only be up for 6 to 10 seconds. The login screen would then be displayed. Recently, it started taking about 1 minute before going to the login screen. After logging in, the system runs fine. Also, if I select "Restart" from the start menu, only about 6 seconds is spent on the "Start Windows" screen after restarting. It's only if I actually shut down the system and power up, does it stay on the "Start Windows" screen for about 1 minute. During this time I don't see the hard drive light flashing except for the last second or two before the login screen. I'm pretty confident that I don't have any sort of infection. McAfee security center has been running with all options checked since day one. I also have SpywareBlaster installed. Just as a precaution I ran Malwarebytes and everything is clean. I also ran a SuperAntispware scan and, except for a few tracking cookies, no issues.
So what's changed. There has been no hardware changes. Windows Update has installed security updates. McAfee installed an update. I also added a printer that's attached to a Windows XP machine that I have. There may have been other updates installed behind the scenes. I don't recall exactly when this slower start time began in relation to any updates.
This behavior may be normal, but I got used to the quick start time. So my question is this, is this normal behavior? I can live with it, but I was wondering if there are some standard settings that I can check. I'm wondering if a Windows update changed something or if McAfee changed something.
Thanks,
Leif W