My bootime speed is agonizingly slow on my Intel Pentium 4 3.0GHZ

[Guest]

I dont know why this is occuring but my Boot speed in loading windows is
crazy slow. A Lot slower than it should be for my machine. I have a Pentium
4.0 3Ghz with Hyper Thread, and 1GB of Dual Channel RAM, and a ATI Radeon
9800 XT 256MB PRO AGP card. And yet it takes forever for my machine to boot.
When i clean install windows it boots at the speed it should which is like 3
loading bars. I do have applications installed but none that I am aware of
that slows down boot speed this extreme. Can anybody help?

 

[Guest]

I dont have any spyware or any malware at all on my computer. I also have
completely defragged my hard drive several times and it is still way to slow
for the speediness of my machine. Id like it to be the way it was when I
fresh installed windows without having to uninstall everything. If it is
possible. It is just plain slow and it shouldnt be.

 

[R. McCarty]

Did you do a Read-Only Chkdsk on your Windows volume ? When
a disk has inconsistencies it can account for some laggard boot times.
Startups and Watchdogs apps will slow down the point where a user
has a usable desktop. XP generally will finish a boot at between 37 to
55 seconds. This is affected by DHCP setup of your NIC. Services
may be "Timing Out" and can be checked by the System Event Log.
Microsoft used to offer a visual tool ( BootVis ) that you could use to
see the complete boot sequence graphically. Using Prefetching many
startup requirements are run in parallel to shorten the boot cycle time.
BootVis was an excellent tool for mapping what happens at boot up
but the tool is no longer available from Microsoft - but other sites still
offer it.

AV & Security Suites are a prime cause of long boot up times. Several
vendor's products are notorious for slowing down the boot sequence.

 

[Uncle Grumpy]

I do have applications installed but none that I am aware of
that slows down boot speed this extreme. Can anybody help?

Do you have the indexing service enabled? Drop it.

Do you have an antivirus package set to scan on bootup? Drop it....
especially if it's a Symantec product.

Do you have a malware scanner set to scan on bootup? Drop it.

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

I dont know why this is occuring but my Boot speed in loading windows
is crazy slow. A Lot slower than it should be for my machine. I have
a Pentium
4.0 3Ghz with Hyper Thread, and 1GB of Dual Channel RAM, and a ATI
Radeon 9800 XT 256MB PRO AGP card. And yet it takes forever for my
machine to boot.

Exactly how long is forever?

My personal view is that the attention many people pay to how long it takes
to boot is unwarranted. Assuming that the computer's speed is otherwise
satisfactory, it may not be worth worrying about. Most people start their
computers once a day or even less frequently. In the overall scheme of
things, even a few minutes to start up isn't very important. Personally I
power on my computer when I get up in the morning, then go get my coffee.
When I come back, it's done booting. I don't know how long it took to boot
and I don't care.

However if you do want to address it, it may be because of what programs
start automatically, and you may want to stop some of them from starting
that way. On each program you don't want to start automatically, check its
Options to see if it has the choice not to start (make sure you actually
choose the option not to run it, not just a "don't show icon" option). Many
can easily and best be stopped that way. If that doesn't work, run MSCONFIG
from the Start | Run line, and on the Startup tab, uncheck the programs you
don't want to start automatically.

However, if I were you, I wouldn't do this just for the purpose of running
the minimum number of programs. Despite what many people tell you, you
should be concerned, not with how *many* of these programs you run, but
*which*. Some of them can hurt performance severely, but others have no
effect on performance.

Don't just stop programs from running willy-nilly. What you should do is
determine what each program is, what its value is to you, and what the cost
in performance is of its running all the time. You can get more information
about these at http://castlecops.com/StartupList.html. If you can't find it
there, try google searches and ask about specifics here.

Once you have that information, you can make an intelligent informed
decision about what you want to keep and what you want to get rid of.

 

[mikeyhsd]

first thing I always do is to delete the CONTENTS of the PREFETCH folder. its under Windows.
the system keeps track of program you run and check for them on boot. but it fails to remove entries when a program is uninstalled\. therefore it chases it tail for a bit looking for the uninstalled programs.
windows will be gin populating the prefetch folder on the next boot.

our personal net nanny will probably tell you it will not work.
but seeing is believing.



(e-mail address removed)



I dont know why this is occuring but my Boot speed in loading windows is
crazy slow. A Lot slower than it should be for my machine. I have a Pentium
4.0 3Ghz with Hyper Thread, and 1GB of Dual Channel RAM, and a ATI Radeon
9800 XT 256MB PRO AGP card. And yet it takes forever for my machine to boot.
When i clean install windows it boots at the speed it should which is like 3
loading bars. I do have applications installed but none that I am aware of
that slows down boot speed this extreme. Can anybody help?

 

[Rock]

I dont know why this is occuring but my Boot speed in loading windows is
crazy slow. A Lot slower than it should be for my machine. I have a
Pentium
4.0 3Ghz with Hyper Thread, and 1GB of Dual Channel RAM, and a ATI Radeon
9800 XT 256MB PRO AGP card. And yet it takes forever for my machine to
boot.
When i clean install windows it boots at the speed it should which is like
3
loading bars. I do have applications installed but none that I am aware of
that slows down boot speed this extreme. Can anybody help?

Do some clean boot troubleshooting.

Clean Boot Troubleshooting

How to Troubleshoot By Using the Msconfig Utility in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=310560

How to perform advanced clean-boot troubleshooting in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=316434

How to perform a clean boot in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=310353