Laptops Laptop takes lot of time to become usable after booting

[raksrules]

I have a Sony Vaio S series Laptop with core i5, 6GB RAM and 640 GB HDD. Windows 7 is installed. It has some dedicated nvidia GPU also which I don't have specs of.
The problem I am facing with this laptop is that a cold boot takes a lot of time, as in the windows page comes but icons are all some default system type looking for sometime and after a minute or so the actual icons show up.
Also the yellow HDD usage light continuously remains on as if HDD is being used constantly thus hampering my ability to interact with the machine. Only after some time things settle down.
Now once everything is fine, I usually just close the lid of laptop and I think it goes to standby or something and when I reopen the lid to use laptop again, it is at the way I left it and I can start using it right away. Due to this I try avoiding shutting down the laptop as after cold boot it takes lot of time to come in a stage where I can interact without the lags.

Any idea what may be the issue and how to fix ?
I minimized and ensured that least amount of things are loaded when machine is boot (through msconfig).

 

[vishalrao]

Tried defragmenting the disk? What about scanning for malware/adware? Also try running something like HDTune to check disk health, in case it is slowly failing...

This is why I have SSDs for my desktop and replaced the HDDs on my two old laptops also It breathed new life into them, they boot up fast and are so snappy and responsive thanks to it!

 

[raksrules]

I shall try whatver all things you told next week. Let's see if something comes up. Thanks for those pointers.

 

[Crapmypants]

What i usually do when facing this problem
1. run anti-virus, anti-spyware and anti-malware scans ( i use avast, spybot and malwarebytes)
2. defragment the hard drive and your registry (i use ccleaner for the registry)
3. ensure that the partition your OS is installed on has some free space (4gb at least)
4. backup your data and reformat. (i found this to be the most reliable fix) -be sure to keep a separate copy of all the latest drivers you'll need as it saves a lot of time post formatting.
5. When you went into msconfig and disabled unnecessary startup items did you also disable useless items from the 'services' tab? Google the services you don't recognize.
6. get an ssd as vishalrao suggests - however i would consider it as a last resort since it involves spending money.

 

[logistopath]

IIRC, Windows 7 and 8 have a scheduled defragmentation that runs in the background once in a while, so a defragmentation is not really needed. You could check windows disk defragmentation tool. It will give you the current fragmentation level, and also tell you when defragmentation was last done.

@raksrules A couple of things that in my experience have caused this lag:
1. KIS or any other antivirus suite. Until all the different components get enabled and active, there might be a lag. Also, check if there are any boot up scans enabled. Like, rootkit scan after every system boot up.
2. HDD that is slowly dying. Run a complete scan for bad sectors.
3. Any other program that is scheduled to run on startup. Like in my case, thunderbird causes a 15 - 20 sec lag when I allow it to run on startup.

I rarely shut down my laptop nowadays. It is always on >> sleep mode >> on >> sleep mode >> indefinitely. When I won't be using my laptop for more than a day, I put it in hibernate.