XP extremely slow boot

[crisscross]

The sliding bars at the Windows XP loading screen seems to take forever. My system config is

Opteron 165
2.5GB RAM
Windows XP Pro SP3.


It's a fairly new installation and only have the basic stuff loaded. Office 2007, Firefox etc. My old T43 Laptop loads up much faster than this.

I have gone through msconfig and disabled all unnecessary programs but no help, also tried changing prefetch settings no difference at all.

Help!

 

[Markbnj]

Usually means a device isn't working and the OS is waiting for the driver to retry and whatnot before it times out and decides it isn't going to work after all. Check the system events in event viewer, and also look in the device manager for any devices that have a yellow exclamation point over their icon, indicating something is wrong.

 

[octopus41092]

Try defragging. Also, try checking all your hard drive plugs and make sure they're all plugged in well.

 

[Smilin]

During that portion of the boot sequence "system" (or start type 1) drivers and services are starting.

Things to help isolate:
1. What Markbnj said. Event logs, devmgmt.msc
2. Shot in the dark - unplug your NIC cable while booting and see if symptoms change. If they do it means something that was waiting on a timeout before gets an instant one now. Concentrate on network drivers/services
3. Use MSConfig again. On services tab, check "hide all microsoft" at the bottom then hit disable all. Reboot and see if it changes. If it does add/remove 1/2 then 1/4 etc of the services until you get the culprit.
4. Use safemode and safemode with networking to see what the results are.

Assuming you get some changed behavior from 3 & 4 you can get things down to a pretty small subset.

 

[Modelworks]

I would run Hijackthis to make sure nothing is running in the background that shouldn't be.
http://www.trendsecure.com/por...urity_tools/hijackthis

 

[crisscross]

Cool thanks.. I have dual Lan and one of them didn't have drivers installed. I tried installing the drivers but it didn't work so just disabled it since i don't need two lan ports anyway.

 

[daveybrat]

Check your event viewer in windows and see if there are any 'disk' errors under system. A hard drive developing bad sectors will take a long time to boot and also slow down your system.