Slow Bootup ->Repair?

[ernestrome]

Will a repair install of XP cure my slow boot up problems?

[Splash]

Erm... you really need to post a little more info. It's far more likely that having a look through MSCONFIG will help you trim down the boot time.

That said - is it a slow boot or a slow login?

[ernestrome]

I have defragged, crap cleaned, virus checked, spyware checked (S&D and ewido), registry optimised, services disabled(workstation, windows update), virtual mem/ paging file adjusted, prefetch cleared etc.

The laptop (a toshiba sat a50) still boots incredibly slowly, and takes a long time before a program will load. I think time from power switch on to loading firefox 2 is around 7 minutes.

Will a repair install help at all?

[Captain Fizz]

Repair wouldn't help much IMHO...

Download Autoruns:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sys...utilities.mspx

It will show you everything that is booting at startup.

Deselect anything you do not need.

I take it you are comparing the speed now to a fresh build?
You'd need to rebuild it every 6 months to keep that speed.
If none of the above worked - Rebuild it.
I cannot see repair speeding things up at all.

[GoNz0]

how much ram does said lappy have ?

[streetster]

double check that your harddrive is running in DMA mode (in device manager), i had a t43 the other day which had 'reset' itself to PIO mode and was operating really really slowly

[Splash]

My money's still on junk running that can be disabled by running MSCONFIG. Failing that download HijackThis and posts the log in here for us to take a look at.

EDIT - also re. the comment on rebuilding every 6 months - fair advice if (like me) you install and uninstall a lot of stuff to test. If nothing has really been installed in those 6 months I would be looking at other issues - my servers certainly don't get rebuilt regularly!

[Captain Fizz]

My money's still on junk running that can be disabled by running MSCONFIG.

That's the usual culprit.

Autoruns picks up what MSConfig sees plus A LOT more.
Try it - StartupCPL picks up more than MSConfig, but Autoruns has all of them.

[ernestrome]

Ram is 1024, but two different types pc266 and 2100, removing either sodimm doesn't make much difference to boot time.

[ernestrome]

I have selected DMA if available, but my primary ide channel is in PIO mode currently.

[streetster]

I thought so

You need to reset this within the registry, first, fire up regedit (start->run-> regedit).

Then navigate to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}

In there you'll find several more 'directories' like 00001, 00002 etc...

find the correct one, and where you have:

MasterIdDataCheckSum REG_DWORD 0x0001f307 (or whatever)

delete this key (select it then hit 'delete').

Then reboot, and windows will re-detect the drive and you should go back to Ultra DMA 5, and everything will be fast and smooth again...

Like i said originally, I had a Thinkpad T43 which was acting slow, simply deleted the registry key, rebooted and everything was fine

[e!] Here is a screenshot just for clarification:

[ernestrome]

Superb, thanks, i thought my gf was going to kill me, should've seen the evil stares as she waited to check her email.

[streetster]

no worries buddy, glad that sorted you out