PC Problem

[rainman748]

My pc (Windows XP) crashed and upon reboot it is extremely slow. It runs through the bios startup at regular speed, but once it gets to the Windows screen it slows down. I would say it takes 15 minutes to get to the login screen. From there it takes another 20 minutes or more to get to the desktop. The mouse moves around at regular speed, but everything else is very slow.

I think I've ruled out RAM failure, because I have 2 x 512 RAM, so even if one stick failed it should still run fine. I havent installed any new programs, and I have spysweeper installed, so I doubt it is malware.

Any ideas what it could be? I'm thinking either processor or HD. Hopefully someone is familiar with this problem. Thanks in advance.

 

[dfuze]

I wonder if the crash corrupted some files needed for bootup. Maybe running the recovery console will work; or a reformat of XP.

 

[rainman748]

Yeah, reformat looks like my next step. Thanks.

 

[dball3]

I just wanted to clear something up for you, even if you have 2 sticks of ram, if one of those go bad it will affect your system. Your computer won't just skip over the bad stick, it will still try to use it, and you will get errors from it. So it would be best to run memtest on it, or run 1 stick at a time to see if there's a difference.