Very, very slow boot up problem

[wavewuver]

I'm running a 2.4 ghz, Pentium 4 with 512 RAM and XP Pro.

The boot up takes a long time.....minutes. It used to be much quicker. I worked with Intel and tried to determine if it was the mobo. Their conclusion was it was a bad board. I could not redo the bios at all. Anyway, I installed a new board yesterday and it is still slow. Very slow. It takes minutes before the icons appear on my desktop.

I'm thinking the problem is either the HD or the RAM.

Anyone have any ideas???????

[Shawn711]

My AMD system had the same problem once, and I found it to be caused by my Windows XP installation.......reinstalled Windows and straightened it right out........went back to starting quickly again...........mine would take like a minute to a minute and a half to fully boot up........took like 10 seconds to go from the first XP startup screen to the screen telling it was loading personal settings.......dunno if that's your problem, but just a idea to try/check into as it may not be faulty hardware at all........

Shawn

[meese]

Are there any warnings or errors in the event logs? If so post them here.

[paul9]

if the delay is from entering your password, to being able to use your system, then suspect too many startup items loading and disable some then start those services only as you need them. otherwise, suspects could include virus scanning, spyware, trojans, or possibly just the computer waiting for a piece of hardware to initialise. also make sure your floppy seek on boot settings are off, and there are no disks in you floppy or cd drives, especially blank disks, as these can cause huge boot delays. make sure your bios is set to boot from drive c as the first boot device (ide0 hdd0 or similar, unless you boot from a scsi hd) unless you often boot from cd or floppy.