My laptop takes roughly 3 weeks to boot up, so I normally just hibernate it. Every few weeks I forget/it starts going crazy and needs a reboot and I remember I should really have a clear out and get it sorted.

What's the clean up software du jour? I've been using CCleaner for quite a while which seems to work OK. Or should I stop being lazy and do it by hand? :(

Also finally got round to uninstalling BitDefender. I've been using Avira for a couple of months now, and I keep forgetting that the BitDefender uninstaller is shit and every time I reboot it pops up telling me it failed to uninstall and launches BD again. Apparently this is such a common problem with BD that they have a seperate uninstall utility on their website :|

Anything else I should do to speed up boot times? The laptop is modern and fast, but the hard drive is slow as heck.

Had a cleanup, uninstalled stuff, disabled useless startup stuff... And it still takes four and a half minutes from typing my password to being able to use Chrome. Da Fuck. Someone buy me a 1Tb ssd :-(

Same here. Hardly anything set to run at startup, all junk cleared out and services configured as per here;

http://www.blackviper.com/service-configurations/black-vipers-windows-vista-service-pack-2-service-configurations/

Yet still takes ages to boot. Tried one of those system boot up analysis tools which told me what was taking so long to boot, but wasn't much help in making it faster.

Co-incidentally it started after I used one of those optimisation programs, similar to CCleaner, which cleaned a lot of stuff and changed loads of settings but ultimately slowed the boot time - and to cap it all buggered up my recovery partition somehow meaning I can't even do a repair or fresh install (no installation disks) without a visit to Jims house.

I think part of the slow boot is due to me having it set to delete all privacy data and overwrite the swap file so at boot it has to re-load everything from scratch into the cache.

I don't think Ccleaner could have made it worse, it's fairly basic....

I was shocked to find Chrome had over 700 meg of browser history and over 70 meg of cookies though 8-O

Ah for fuck's sake, Bit Defender is /still/ installed. Cunting piece of shit.

I might (try to) get rid of it too. It blocks far too many websites for my liking.

Running the uninstall tool in safe mode with admin privs seems to have done it.