Windows XP slow loading

[Chan]

Anyone know whats happening on the "black/blank" screen that happens between the first windows loading screen and the blue welcome screen. Bro said his comp was loading really slow so went and looked and it goes past the windows loading in 4-5s then takes like 10s on the black screen compared to usually going instantly to the welcome.

He says he hasn't changed any settings.. have no idea where to start! comp seems to be running fine once its loaded though.

Getting W7 soon.. looks like will have to format his comp as well :/

[Chan]

Been trying out different things this morning to try and find the problem... it seems that it was one of his harddrives, theres no faults with the hd according to WD Diag, and it doesn't contain the OS it's just a storage HD with 400gig or so of general stuff.

Bios/Driver issue? or XP just not liking large volume of data?

[Flibb]

have you checked to see if any processes are gobbling cpu or memory, sorted a very slow booting xp rig out at the weekend, one of the anti spyware progs was maxing out the cpu.

[Chan]

have you checked to see if any processes are gobbling cpu or memory, sorted a very slow booting xp rig out at the weekend, one of the anti spyware progs was maxing out the cpu.

None of the shown processes was using any CPU/Memory, but there shouldn't be any processes running from that HD anyway unless its infected with something that MSE can't detect.

[vti_786]

try changing the boot order in bios, have the hdd as number 1, and what ever you like at 2 and 3, when it says boot from other device, disable that.

try that, it might be accessing the other hdd to see if its got an OS installed or not

[Time Bandit]

Also you might want to check the start up folder and delete stuff from that - it amazes me how many programs assume you want them running from start up and install there without asking.

If all else fails there is nothing like a reinstall to blow out the cobwebs and sort out all of the stuff you don't really need.

[CWH]

A handy program for checking what's happening at startup, is Mike Lin's StartUp manager.
It's available at http://www.mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml and you can disable or delete anything you want.

Colin

[sybrows]

Been trying out different things this morning to try and find the problem... it seems that it was one of his harddrives, theres no faults with the hd according to WD Diag, and it doesn't contain the OS it's just a storage HD with 400gig or so of general stuff.

Bios/Driver issue? or XP just not liking large volume of data?

I agree with the comments about checking startup items (msconfig ) Also....Where is the pagefile sitting on this machine? Could it be that it is sitting on a full or nearly full drive (the 400 gig one) or that that drive is fragmented?


My 2 cents

BrOw

[Searcher2]

It's a long shot I know - but he hasn't got Symantec/Norton Antivirus on his PC has he? My PC used to be really slow to boot up with XP and I discovered it was Norton that was causing the problem. Moved onto Eset NOD32 and have been fine since. I was using a corporate version I got from work (I worked from home) and I can only assume it expired or something - the corporate version has no expiry warnings.