Help, Windows XP takes > 5 mins to boot?

[sine]

Hi,

I have some sort of problem with xp starting up. For a while now xp has been takin a really long time to boot. Everything loads fine up until after u see the little xp graphic. It disappears then i get a black screen and it seems like nothing is happening for roughly 5 mins. After that i hear some disk activity and xp continues loading. ANy ideas how i could go about troubleshooting this. It seems as if the OS might be running some sort of discovery process or PNP type event or something? Anyway its really getting annoying.



I found in the beginning that sometimes if i hit ctrl-alt-del repeatedly it seemed to break out of whatever its doing and keep loading. Doesnt always work though.

P4 2.53
XP Pro SP 1
Asus P4C800 Deluxe mobo
1GB Ram

any help appreciated

thx

 

[Motero]

Could potentially be a harddrive problem. Run diags on the drive...see if it finds anything...otherwise I might be inclinded to think of adware...in which case you need a program to delete that stuff. Check for viruses...

 

[altonb1]

How old is this build of XP? I'm not concerned with age of components, really, but how old is your install of XP on the hardware?

if you have a habit of installing/removing many different software apps and such, i would say that your system is PROBABLY bogged down from the bloated registry. if you have invalid registry entries, the OS could be searching for things that don't exist. What type of internet connection? perhaps configured for DHCP and Windows is searching for an IP address during boot up? I used to have Win98 and I had a really slow bootup process due to the network configuration for DSL and DHCP. i don't remember all the details, now, but that is something else I would check.

Look in your system event viewer after a successful boot and see if you can determine what is causing the errors. START/SETTINGS/CONTROL PANEL/ADMINISTRATIVE TOOLS.

 

[KenSimone]

My guess is that it's network related (as the previous poster suggested). Is your machine trying to get an IP address from a DHCP server that doesn't exist?

 

[lobadobadingdong]

run > msconfig.exe

under startup select the de-select all button, click ok, and restart, does it's boot time improve? if so find out which program is loading on startup that is causing the problem, one at a time enable the ones you need running on startup...you'll find many don't need to run at all anyway. you might also get a copy of adaware from download.com and update/run it to remove any spyware, and update a run a virus scan.

 

[loup garou]

Originally posted by: KenSimone
My guess is that it's network related (as the previous poster suggested). Is your machine trying to get an IP address from a DHCP server that doesn't exist?

I wouldn't say so as network problems usually manifest themselves during "preparing network connections" and "loading user profile" phase of startup.

My guess would be a corrupt driver or a bloated registry. Restart in safe mode and see where it's hanging during startup. My first guess is agp440.sys.