[elysion]

My laptops about a month old and over the last few days when starting up it will show the Compaq logo then stay on a black screen for about ten minutes with very little HDD activity, just a few flickers of the light every five seconds.
After about ten minutes it will load up perfectly fine, and seems no different once it's loaded.
Though if I shut it down using hibernate this doesn't happen at all, it just loads up normally.

I've been told to uninstall Norton 360 and reset the windows firewall to default settings to fix it, this didn't help.
System Restore won't fix it as I have no points from before this problem.

Any help is appreciated, would also like to know if hibernating will cause any problems if used all the time?

[etaf]

try booting into safe mode
tap F8 as it starts
then choose safe mode from the menu

if that works we can look at the startups that might be causing the problem or do a clean boot
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/331796

[bigioale]

Its a system registry problem, I had one of these before and my computer did the same thing. Boot into safe mode and download and install CCleaner. Tell it to clean up your system registry and the problem goes away. Also never boot your computer with external devices plugged in (ex. iPod, external hard drive etc...)

[JohnWill]

Well, CCleaner isn't for the faint of heart, it's rendered many machines inert, as have most common registry cleaners.

Before you go using a registry cleaner, you may want to read some alternative opinions from experts.


A good read: Ed Bott: "Why I don’t use registry cleaners"

Another opinion from a Microsoft MVP: Thoughts about Registry Cleaners and System Tweaking Tools