xp pro reinstall

[Silvergrey]

Yesterday I installed SP2. The system seemed OK until this morning. When I
turned it on the BIOS (Intel) splash screen appeared for it's normal 2
seconds, the screen then goes black for about 10 seconds and then the BIOS
splash screen reappears - this sequence would loop forever unless I stop it.
It appeared there was a missing or corrupt file that the boot needed. I
booted from the XP CD and chose repair XP. Now my boot works but the boot
time increased from 45 seconds to over 2 minutes and the entire system is
dead-dog slow. After I get a desktop the system takes nearly another minute
to load Norton AV 2004, make my network (cable internet) connect and to put
the volume icon in the tray (which, by the way, only appeared with the first
boot after the OS reinstall. Now it doesn't appear unless I go to Sounds and
uncheck then recheck the Place Volume Icon on the taskbar box.

My experience (xp home and/or pro), having installed these OSs numerous
times on quite a few different systems, is that repairing, or installing,
over an existing version ALWAYS produces the same bloated slowdowns. Is
this slowdown/bloating just an XP thing on overinstalling?

 

[R. McCarty]

Defrag the drive, then check System Event log for any errors. SP2
after Layout.Ini/Prefetch is rebuilt should be as fast as it was before
SP2 was applied. From your description it sounds like a Service is
not starting or out-of-sequence and causing the excessive startup
time. For really comprehensive defrag, get a 30-day trial of Raxco's
Perfect Disk 2000 (Version 6) & do both an Off-line and GUI
based defrag. Read the help on setting options.
I think you'll like the results. Download PDisk from:
http://www.raxco.com/products/downloadit/perfectdisk2000_download.cfm

 

[Alex Nichol]

My experience (xp home and/or pro), having installed these OSs numerous
times on quite a few different systems, is that repairing, or installing,
over an existing version ALWAYS produces the same bloated slowdowns. Is
this slowdown/bloating just an XP thing on overinstalling?

What happens is that all the optimisations of file layout generated by
the PreFetch system become invalid; and the many new files are scattered
where they landed on the disk. So things have to re-optimise. Defrag
the disk and reboot. Reboot every couple of days for a bit as PreFetch
rebuilds its data; it will then start its every 3 days mini defrag
optimisation (if you leave an idle period) and in a few days things
should improve