Black screen before welcome screen

[Guest]

I have Dell 4600 which is about 3 years old.I have two hard drives which are
both about 80% full. When I boot up my computer it goes to the Dell screen
and the Windows loading screen. After the Windows screen my computer has a
black screen that will stay for about 4or 5 minutes, during which the
processor does not show signs of working. and then the welcome screen comes
up to select a user. I use Mcafee services as well as Spybot and other
spyware programs. Could anyone help me get the welcome screen to load faster?

 

[Maurice N ~ MVP]

Following is only a starter set (though basic).

Free up space on your hard drives. Run Disk Cleanup. Search for all ..tmp (dot tmp) files. Delete those.

Run MSCONFIG. Review closely the Startup tab. Trim back on your user startup apps.

Then close all your user programs, close all antivirus, and all programs in your startup tray. Then run Disk Defragmenter.

When it is done, Restart Windows.

 

[Guest]

Thank you, I have this problem with Disk defragmenter where it does not
completly finish. It says that it has completed but leaves the drive still
very much fragmented, is there a way to get defragmenter to finish all the
way, is there a third party defragmenter alternative?

 

[Maurice N ~ MVP]

Heartily recommend Raxco's PerfectDisk see http://www.raxco.com
You'll find it to be superior.

I'm a bit concerned about your statement that Disk Defrag did "not completely finish". You mean it crashed, showed an error condition, or what?
There are some files it cannot move.

 

[Guest]

Disk Defragmenter does complete. But it does not do a good job. It hardly
frees up any disk space.

 

[Conor]

Disk Defragmenter does complete. But it does not do a good job. It hardly
frees up any disk space.

Disk Defragmenters are there to rearrange files, not free up space.

--
Conor

If Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened
rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic
music.

 

[Guest]

Well it sure has not made it noticably faster, and when I analyze again it is
still mostly fragmented. If it was doing a good job it wouldn't be done in
30min. The Win9x defrags used to take hours, they did a good job, and they
were interesting to watch too.