I have an hp pavilion dv4 laptop with vista home premium and linux mint 8. Every time I boot up my computer a flashing underscore appears in the top left corner for ~1 min. then everything is normal. This is a shared computer and I am the only one who uses linux (sad, I know) but boot up time needs to be fast. Is the one minute load normal?

Thanks for any help you can give!

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A just rebooted 3 times. The first grub loaded in less then 2 seconds. Then again. The third time it took a minute and a half.

Improper closing of laptops causes this. Shutdown vista properly. I had faced the similar problem.

I had openSUSE,ubuntu,XP in my laptop. some times if had improperly closed. i.e. just pressing powerbutton to shutdown. or sudden removing of battery so that close the system when it hangs. Then after whenever I start first time BIOS will be loaded very slowly. But for the next time it will be normal speed. When I came to notice this type of situation, I had stopped doing improper closing of my laptop

Had similar problem when I had vista home premium loaded on with ubuntu... I remember having same problem that the cursor would flash for about a minute then start loading after improper shut down... I think I remember reading that it was the vista backup portion of drive causing that problem... So I decided to get ride off vista first I played with formatting the portion of the hard drive that had the vista back up.... Got ride of the problem .... But since my ubuntu was taking up about 80 gigs of 120 gig hard drive.. I deleted my vista and never looked back...

Just in case your getting to this point there is a program called "play on linux" that allows you to load windows programs and run them in wine....

Also I had a Acer laptop .... another solution I came up with was I loaded my laptop with 4 gigs of ram... Got the delay down to 35 seconds....

I also had a slow down in boot time due to I had Frostwire on the same partition as my system ... This caused the drive to become fragmented and really slowed down my boot time.... The solution was to create a separate partition for the frostwire program....

right now I am experimenting with Fedora 11

good luck

Thanks for your help I will try rebooting properly. It might be hard considering vista takes an HOUR to shut down. (gotta hate vista )