A few things-
- Your dsl 'modem' ... if it's NAT translating your connection from your home machines to the world, then it's likely got some basic 'firewalling' included (as in not allowing inbound connections except from established outbound-initiated traffic flows)... may want to check that out.
- Your provider's 'firewalling' that occurs within their network- please never trust it. In fact, security outsourced is no security at all... ever.
- Windows firewall in vista is quite a step up from the firewall software included with XP. Be sure that nothing has 'hijacked' it in the sense that it's unnecessarily including tons of rules and exlcusions.
- Vista's performance monitoring is also a quite a step up from XP's version- you may want to get that fired up during the cold-boot delay issues to see if your disk i/o, cpu, or other resources are being hogged up, and if so, by what applications/processes.
- If you have a 64-bit system, running 32-bit Vista can be an issue performance-wise... this is my personal experience with my workplace desktop- switched from 32-bit Vista to 64-bit Vista on my core2duo and the overall system is significantly faster (and it sees the 4th Gig of RAM in my system finally (32-bit Windows will only see 3gigs.))
- My wife's laptop is a Vista system and has multiple issues related to it (and yes it's a 32-bit OS on a 64 bit system, but we're talking other issues)- the best practice we've found is to let the thing run as long as possible with out constantly shutting it down and cold-booting.
Hope these pointers help in some way...
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Network Firefighter
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