Slow XP startup

[SonicIce]

XP used to load pretty quick. It used to only take <20 seconds at the loading bar. Recently it has been taking over 2 minutes. As soon as it shows the user list and I get into the desktop its just as fast as ever. It just takes forever on the loading screen.

My hard drive is completely defragged. I used Microsoft Bootvis which is supposed to help speed up boot times and it didn't help. I used spyware scanners and they found a couple tracking cookies which didn't help. I installed Avast antivirus and did a full scan at startup and it found 2 dll files in my system folder that were identified as viruses but deleting them didn't help either.

Why is my boot so slow?

Specs:
Athlon 64 2800+
1GB PC-3200
Epox nForce 3 250Gb
6800 GT
XP Pro SP2
WD 250GB sata

 

[jphoto801]

Well, a couple of things you didn't list as checking.

Items in startup folder?

Bootup items? A nice way of editing that (aside from msconfig) is Mike Lin's "Startup Control Panel" - http://www.mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml

Registry cleaning?

Services creep? Software you install may be sneaking in new services. Plus, you can tweak your original ones that arn't needed. - http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm

 

[SonicIce]

Yea I forgot to mention those.

Startup folder is empty
Everything is unchecked in msconfig
What the safest way to clean the registry?
There are alot of services running but they all mostly look like Microsoft ones. I'll see what I can disable.

 

[Griffinhart]

Do you have many USB devices plugged in? Some devices add a noticeable amount of time to boot up. I have a webcam, for example, that doesn't finish loading the driver until after it goes through it's start up sequence of testing the motorized movement of the device.

 

[jphoto801]

CCleaner is a file + registry cleaner in wide use. I use it on three PC's here and I've never had it break anything. - http://www.ccleaner.com/

There's an older one I loved called...regcleaner? Anyway, it's very old and doesn't seem to work on multi-core CPU's so I had to drop it.

 

[SonicIce]

No devices plugged in except printer and scanner.
I cleaned out the registry with CCleaner.
Still no dice. What the heck?

 

[jphoto801]

The services going-over really is what did it for me. Also, what defragger are you using? Some of the more advanced ones will do some tricks like placing your system files on the fastest parts of the drive, putting directories close to the MFT, etc.

 

[SonicIce]

Ok I figured it out! All I did was unplug the network cable from my onboard NIC and plug it into my PCI NIC. I think the onboard one is defective because it gives me a blue screen when I try to disable it. No problem I just won't use it.

Now it shows the XP loading screen for a grand total of about 5 seconds literally!
I was using Diskeeper, btw.
Thanks alot guys, sorry to waste your time.
Welcome to Anandtech jphoto!

 

[VinDSL]

~koo

 

[nerp]

You might want to disable the NIC in the BIOS if your motherboard permits you to do so. It should dissapear from device manager at that point and you need not worry about disabling it.

 

[jphoto801]

Glad you got that sorted out.

I've actually been posting here for...a decade? A long time, but I stopped for a while (a couple years) for whatever reason and I guess the system lost my post count. Aaaaand now I'm old and grouchy and angry at the government and the kids who play on my lawn.

 

[imported_wired247]

Better solution than the one you found: never shut down unless totally necessary...

works great