Sloooowww boot

[Lowrent]

Howdy: My neighbor has a Compaq with WinXP SP2 on it. It has 512RAM
and an Intel 2.9GHz chip.The problem is that when he re-boots or cold
starts his computer, it takes forever. At first the Compaq boot screen
comes up.........and stays there. For at least 3 or 4 minutes. Then
the screen goes black for about 30 seconds and then it goes to the
BIOS display page and sits there for about 30 seconds. Then it goes
black again for another 30-45 seconds, then it starts Windows and it
takes about 1 to 1 1/2 minutes to get to a ready to go desktop.

I've been in and turned of the normal things for the serveses. He only
has his firewall, anti-viurus, Yahoo messenger and the other normal
stuff (5 items) in his start-up menu in MSCONFIG. I have turned off
all auto updaters, cleaned out the temp, internet temp, cookie and all
the bogus programs that I could find.

We scandisked (took forever) and defragged the hard drive (80 gigs).
There are no red 'X's or yellow exclamation marks in Device Manager.
All things there are said by Windows to be working properly. No IRQ
conflicts. Have run updated virus scanner and latest defs for Ad-Aware
and even went online for a trojan scan.

I'm at a loss as to how to proceed from here! Any and all help would
be mucho appriciated! Thank you.

 

[S.Sengupta]

See:-
'How to troubleshoot by using the System Configuration utility in
Windows XP'
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;310560

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

regards,
ssg MS-MVP

 

[Bob I]

I would suspect a hardware or BIOS issue, as the problem occurs prior to
the operating system loading sequence. You may wish to contact HP/compaq
tech support with the issue.