Agonizingly slow boot time

[Gaidal]

Hey guys, here are my computer specs.

AMD Thunderbird 950
Asus A7V
256 MB PC133 Ram (Kingston)
Diamond 40 gig hard drive 7200 rpm
SB Live! Platinum
Windows 98

I used to get pretty good boot times (around 20 seconds). However, yesterday I moved my computer home from college and now the boot times have slowed down drastically. I'm getting a minute if I'm lucky and it's kind of annoying me. I defragged, ran scandisk on my hard drive and same problem. Only possible thing I can see is that perhaps my USB ports are somewhat screwy since the power light for those are coming on at strange times (i.e. the mouse will be lit up but not the webcam, and vice versa). Once I'm in windows, everything works fine and there aren't any stability problems. One other problem I might be having is that I still have the original BIOS revision of the A7V. Will upgrading it help me. Any other ideas? Thanks!

 

[Impact55]

Are you positive everything is seated correctly ( plugged- in), because boot times reflect the time it takes to recgonize your hardware.

 

[Dulanic]

Go to the asus site and download the Promise Build 25 drivers.... the other versions cause a long boot delay.

 

[tontod]

Do you have dhcp enabled? If so, it can take a while to boot up sometimes while it's trying to query the dhcp server for an IP address.

 

[Quickfingerz]

disable your network card for now

 

[Dee67]

just to humor me, check performance in system properties - could your system be booting out of 32bit mode for some reason?


(o)(o)

 

[Unsickle]

No ambiguity here. It is your network card searching for a dhcp server. Either connect your computer to your home network or disable TCP/IP bound to your network card.

 

[Gaidal]

Thanks guys, that's exactly what it was! I did get a DCHP error the first time I booted up my computer and that's what it was. Thanks!