Slow Booting and Loading

[nasttcar]

Posted a bunch here lately and gotten great help. Many, many Thanks

Same Dell, 3.2, 2gb RAM, 40/200/300 hard drives, XP ProSP2, ATI 9800 Vid. Computer boots from the 40gb drive that is connected directly to MB. That drive is 60% full and has been defrag'd etc. Have run Registry Mechanic. Computer is virus free per Panda.

Computer just seems to take alot longer to do the boot process (several minutes) and then desktop takes several minutes to fully load.

First web page to load is slow but others are reasonably OK.

Things seem to be alot slower since adding the last 300gb hard drive.

Open to all suggestions.

 

[sieistganzfett]

i dont know or can't remember the history of the pc, i'm a little lazy to look through old posts, only checked the your rig specs on the link.. 40GB is ide, master on the primary channel, using an 80wire cable, not the old school 40 wire that are mainly used for cdroms still right? which other drive is the slave on that cable? a hard drive or a cdrom? would disconnecting the 200 and 300GB drive make things faster by a huge amount when you use your 40GB OS drive? how much stuff is booting up with the pc in terms of processes? is everything that slow booting to safemode?

 

[docinthebox]

Download AutoRuns from Sysinternals and clean up your auto-start programs - delete all the ones you don't need. I did that and it really sped up my boot a lot.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/Autoruns.mspx

As with any program that modifies the registry, be careful though. If you delete the wrong stuff, you may get your computer to hang. I would strongly suggest backing up first before trying it. Nevertheless, the program has been really helpful to me.