A new pain in starting Windows 7
 

Well not entirely new by appearing to be fairly common Google says.

This morning I tried to start Windows 7 and after 13 attempts it started. What normally happens at start up is that it gets to 'Starting Windows' appearing on the screen with its 4 little stars bursting into MS's logo and then freezes. My sequence is to switch off and then on again and it proceeds as above. On VERY limited occasions it will start after two or three attempts and once it is up and running all is well.

Any ideas what the cause may be. I recently replaced my 2xDDR2 memory banks with 2gb each so it isn't memory related.........I think.

As I said, Google shows a really large world of worry on the problem.

Have you tried booting in safe mode ?
You could also try verbose mode boot too.

How old is your hard drive ? Have you checked it ?

But quite frankly, you could easily spend a week or more diagnosing this sort of problem, trying to find solutions, testing all sorts of combinations and basically just digging yourself into a deeper hole by fiddling with stuff ...... the easier option may just be to reformat, re-install and restore files from backups.

I had the exact same problem once, at first it seemed like it was the HDD, but then it turned out to be a crap HDD controller on the motherboard... Lots and lots of wailing / gnashing of teeth figuring that out...

(but then I changed the motherboard in 30 minutes using only a small kitchen knife. Yay Thinkpads!)

For what it's worth, a year or two ago I had the reverse problem, Win 7 wouldn't shut down. After lots of messing about I did what mixture has suggested and tried booting into safe mode, from which it shut down cleanly.

I updated/re-installed some drivers (one at a time followed by a full Windows start-up and shutdown to check if the problem was still there), and found out a corrupt graphics driver was causing the problem.

Could be anything though! Good luck.

Indeed... that is the correct course of action... methodically doing stuff one step at a time and, in the case of configuration settings (rather than drivers), changing settings back every time before changing new settings.

So if PPRuNe Pop is willing to put in the time, then I'd start by ruling out hardware issues, then updating drivers one by one, then finally start fiddling with configuration settings.

If all that seems like too much hard work, then see my "easy answer" above. :cool:

I second that statement !

I occasionally get the same problem with Windows H'eight. Unlikely to be hardware, all fairly new stuff.

I had less hassle in my life before computers. ( or maybe it just seems like that now ? )