A few weeks ago my PC startup slowed down from 1 minute to 4-5 minutes. I use Soluto program to monitor and according to their info my system files and antivirus are using 3 minutes of boot time. I uninstalled the AV and the time was reduced to 3-3.5 minutes.
I recently learned how to check Event Viewer in Admin tools for boot performance warnings. Almost every boot a different process or program is causing a delay (Explorer.exe, svchost, searchindexer, antivirus, SMSSInit, mmcss, rpcss, CD rom, also Soluto, Windefend, LogonUI, audiosrv, eventlog, audioendpointbuilder, PreshellInit)
The latter being the oldest... Event ID 108 PreShellinit. The most common are Explorer.exe, svchost, and antivirus. Also included in the list of boot warnings is many shutdown and suspend warnings, errors, criticals... I'm assuming some amount is normal. Im using a one year old Win 7 laptop. I need help with the boot time, can someone help? Thanks for reading

Time to back up and reinstall the OS.

System restore has an option to reset my PC to factory condition, is that the same? Do you think that would work?

Yes and yes

Yes and yes

Thank you
I took a chance and tried your advice. I didn't have anything to lose. The total reinstall took only 15 minutes and has completely fixed the problem. My boot time is an amazing 45 - 55 seconds, all programs run faster, multitasking is faster, shut down is faster. Its like a new computer again, I removed all the bloat-ware, again, and since I know what other programs I use most and prefer, I reinstalled without trials and errors. I don't think I would have reinstalled windows if I didn't know something about the startup diagnosis.

Good news, thanks for reporting back.