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PC running sluggish, takes forever to boot

C

colsm44

Junior Member
Problem: A relative has a Gateway computer, only received the 90 day warranty, and now it's running sluggish and takes a long time to boot (5+ minutes). Gateway tech told him it sounded like a bad IDE cable, but he replaced it and it's still doing the same thing. Also, he tried to reinstall XP, but it boots to the bios and won't let him boot from a cd.

The tech support told him that it was probably a bad hard drive and/or motherboard, and tried to get 350 bucks out of him, which I then told him he could get a new system to do what he needed (internet browsing/email functions mainly) for around that price.

So my question is, anyone ever had the problem, or think they know what it might be? I've built my own system so I know some basic PC knowledge but I can't really go look at his system since he's 120+ miles away. Thanks for any response!



Specs that I know of:

Gateway, Pentium 4 proc., 512 mb ram, 120 gb HD, Windows XP.
 
Adware and spy ware have and can cause many problems, does your friend have the recovery CD? This is always an option. Sounds to me you need to FDisk, reformat and re-install XP.
 
Thanks for the response guys. Yes, he has the recovery disk (that came with the Gateway), problem is, the bios won't let him boot from a CD. It comes up into the bios, says "Hit F4 to go into BIOS", and hangs there for the 5 plus minutes til it finally boots into XP(or so I understand via telephone calls). Thanks for the links to Ad-Aware and Spybot, I already have those, we're thinking this is a different issue, because just a day ago everything was fine with no slow down. I'll have him run those and check though, just to make sure. Any other suggestions are welcome.
 
...problem is, the bios won't let him boot from a CD. It comes up into the bios, says "Hit F4 to go into BIOS", and hangs there for the 5 plus minutes til it finally boots into XP...
Click to expand...
Is the slowness in the startup occurring during the POST or while loading Windows, or both?

If it's slow loading Windows then spyware would be my first thought too, and even if it's running okay it's a good idea to run antispyware software like the above periodically.

Based on what you said above though, I would definitely look to the drives and cables. Check the BIOS setup and see what drives it shows in there under the IDE configuration. If the hard drive shows but you're missing the CDROM, that might be the hang-up.

If you're comfortable tinkering with the hardware, you can check the following to do some process of elimination (I'm assuming there's only 1 hard drive and 1 CDROM here):
- Does the computer boot right up as it's supposed to if you disconnect the (should be secondary) IDE cable from the CDROM drive?
- Is the CDROM detected in BIOS if you hook the primary IDE cable up to it and leave the hard drive disconnected? If so, can you boot to a CD?
- What happens if you disconnect the CDROM and hook the hard drive up to the secondary IDE cable? Is it detected in BIOS and does it boot to Windows?

Before you go through that you might want to simply reseat the IDE cable connections at the CDROM drive and at the other end going into the motherboard to make sure that's not all it is. Obviously just make sure you take the appropriate ESD precautions and note how things were hooked up before you change things.
 
One quick thought. Could your friend have somehow set his hard drive to PIO mode. That would slow things down considerably
 
It goes to POST fine, and he can tinker with the bios, or so I understand via our telephone conversations. The problem occurs when it's trying to load windows, and once he finally does get into windows, everything is very, very sluggish. I haven't made the trip to see myself yet, and I'm not sure when I'll be available to do so, but I will check everything you guys have mentioned. Thanks again, and keep the suggestions coming if you happen to have more.
 
Just got off the phone with him again, to clear it up a little:

System will POST, but continously loops at the BIOS setup screen ("Hit F4 to enter setup"). It will continue to loop here until he hits F4, then from the setup menu he has to hit ESC, exit without saving changes, and then it will start loading windows. This is when the 5+ minute load times occur. He's also tried changing the boot sequence, to no avail. The system won't recognize any of his (2) CD drives or (1) DVD drive. He also said he's ran the spyware and spybot programs and even performed a full system scan with his copy of norton and nothing comes up.

That's all I have for now. Suggestions welcome.
 
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