Slow Windows 7 Startup? Too Many Restore Points may be the Reason

If you find that your Windows 7 is rather slow to start up these days, you may want to check out the number of restore points your computer has. As per this article released by Microsoft, the Windows 7 startup process gets slow when you create many restore points. Reason stated by Microsoft for this is as follows:

This issue occurs because the boot plan for the ReadyBoot feature exceeds the size limit of 512 kilobytes (KB). Each restore point creates a snapshot of Windows that Volsnap.sys must validate during the startup process. When you create many restore points, the boot plan for the ReadyBoot feature eventually exceeds the size limit of 512 KB, and cannot be stored. Therefore, startup I/O operations are not precached, and the startup process is slow.

Unfortunately, Microsoft does not give a specific number of how many restore points actually lead to this issue, so it may vary from PC to PC.

The Solution

To resolve this issue, you can apply a hotfix from KB2555428 that Microsoft has created to tackle this issue. Do so, only if you are regularly facing this problem as hotfixes are experimental updates that Microsoft pushes out to solve critical customer problems.

My advice is : get rid of older System Restore points you no longer need. You can use CCleaner to remove System Restore point(s) :

To remove System Restore points :

1. In CCleaner, click on the "Tools" icon in the left
2. Select "System Restore".
   
3. Select the System Restore point in the list that you want to remove. Or, use CTRL+Click to select multiple System Restore points.
4. Click "Remove". You are prompted to confirm the deletion. Click "OK".
5. To remove other System Restore points, repeat steps 3 to 4.