[HPLovecraft]

Hi All

Today I had to replace my Toshiba laptop L300 with an L350 after an accident involving a glass of wine.

Both machines came with Vista Home Premium pre-installed.

Now, the old machine used to boot in about 40 secs - but this new one gets stuck for ages at a blue screen with a 'please wait' message in the middle of the screen for about 2 mins. Once booted the machine is fine. I'm not really a computer buff but I managed to find the event log which shows a warning but no real details. The timings are as follows

BootStartTime: 20:51:38
BootEndTime: 20:55:14

BootTime: 49437
MainPathBootTime: 25137
BootPostBootTime: 24300
BootPrefetchInitTime: 42481

The funny thing is the software is identical to the package that came with the L300 - when I used to boot that machine I wouldn't get the blue screen at all - it was a black screen with a yellow progress bar that used to do about 8 passes then go straight to the log-on screen and from there immediately into the desktop with little delay. Now, the new machine does the 8 passes on the yellow bar as before, then a windows logo appears with the boop-boop-beep-beep start noise, then the blue screen appears with the please wait message for ages (lots of disk activity) before I get to the log on screen. It concerned me that there is a warning in the event log and the total boot time (BootEndTime-BootStartTime) is about 3 min 56 secs, but I can't see if its one thing imparticular that is causing the delay.

Help!