Why am I feeling deceived? *sigh*

[Serp86]

The deal is, after about 1.5yrs without a format, I thought that maybe it was time to do a little cleanup on my desktop and do it. Everything went without a hitch, so I guess I shouldn't be posting here. Everything except for speed.

The thing is, the first few startups into a clean windows took only about 20seconds (impressive on an athlon xp 2600+) and this thing would shut down in only about 6 seconds from the time I pressed "shutdown".

A couple of driver installs, windows fixes and a few programs later (only about 5 which aren't even memory resident) the damn machine is nearly as slow as ever. I did notice a considerable increase in startup times after I installed the drivers for the radeon 9700.

Damn startup times.

P.S. Anyone know how to decrease startup times on a clean windows install?

 

[spherrod]

You can use this to analyse bootup speed

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Tweak/System-Tweak/BootVis.shtml

 

[Serp86]

BTW - after I installed the ATI drivers, I had to restart, but after that time, every time I start up windows, a folder is opened automatically on startup and goes to the path: "C:\Program Files\ATI"

How can I prevent this folder from opening everytime? I tried msconfig but didn't find anything unusual

 

[imported_Phil]

I had the same problem (folder opening). Start -> Run -> msconfig.

In the Startup tab, take a note of any entries related to ATI that are not enclosed in quotes ("example.exe").

Then, Start -> Run -> regedit.

Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run and modify any ATI entries to include quotes.

Pour example :

c:\program files\ati\some_random_program.exe

Would become:

"c:\program files\ati\some_random_program.exe"

This is what solved it for me, there's a difficult-to-find article on Microsoft's Knowledge Base about this, and it drove me mad too. Following these steps should sort it for you.

Lastly, you'll be wanting to download and run this, which dramatically improved my boot and shutdown times. Shutdown when from ~20 seconds to 6 seconds, and bootup went from ~30 seconds to about 20 seconds. Highly recommended