Excessive Boot Time

[Blaine]

Dell System
Latitude Notebook
Intel Pentium 3, 1GHz
256 MB RAM
XP Home Edition, All updates now reinstalled

A friend brought me this computer to troubleshoot. When I first turned it
on it displayed the Dell logo and seemed to be progressing through the boot
routing. However, instead of going on to Windows, I just got a black screen.
I restarted, checked BIOS settings, everything seemed ok, but still no
Windows. I tried F8 and got the Boot Menu but no matter what I chose, no
Windows, so I did a reinstall of Windows XP. Everything went ok, but at
restart...black screen. It just so happen one time that I left the black
screen on, and after quite a few minutes some type of status bar appeared.
It took quite a few more minutes to make it across the screen, then, WOW!,
Windows loaded. But every reboot, same long wait, same status bar. Anyone
know what can be causing this long boot? Is the status bar from Windows or
the BIOS? Thanks.

 

[R. McCarty]

256 Megabytes of physical RAM makes the notebook way under
powered. The symptoms you describe would indicate serious disk
errors, making the boot extremely slow. 1st diagnostic approach
is to boot to the XP CD Recovery Console and use Chkdsk.

 

[Terry R.]

The date and time was 11/4/2008 3:30 PM, and on a whim, Blaine pounded
out on the keyboard:

Dell System
Latitude Notebook
Intel Pentium 3, 1GHz
256 MB RAM
XP Home Edition, All updates now reinstalled

A friend brought me this computer to troubleshoot. When I first turned it
on it displayed the Dell logo and seemed to be progressing through the boot
routing. However, instead of going on to Windows, I just got a black screen.
I restarted, checked BIOS settings, everything seemed ok, but still no
Windows. I tried F8 and got the Boot Menu but no matter what I chose, no
Windows, so I did a reinstall of Windows XP. Everything went ok, but at
restart...black screen. It just so happen one time that I left the black
screen on, and after quite a few minutes some type of status bar appeared.
It took quite a few more minutes to make it across the screen, then, WOW!,
Windows loaded. But every reboot, same long wait, same status bar. Anyone
know what can be causing this long boot? Is the status bar from Windows or
the BIOS? Thanks.

Hi Blaine,

You stated you did a "reinstall". Did you format and start clean? If
you just did a repair install, the old XP could be burdened down with
years of junk.

We had some workstations on one network that only had 256 meg of RAM,
but the CPU was a 2.6GHz, and they were quite slow. Bumping the ram to
768 meg made a huge difference, and a couple we replaced the hard drives
with 7,200 rpm drives and that made another big improvement in
performance. As long as the Dell doesn't use RDRAM, you can get 512 meg
for pretty cheap.

If you have a clean install, it could be that you don't have any proper
drivers for the hardware. That could make a difference in performance.
But with 256 meg of RAM and only a 1GHz CPU, you can't expect too
much. And if the video is onboard, there's even less RAM for Windows to
use.

I don't know what you mean by "status bar". I haven't seen anything
like that in the BIOS's I work with. And if it was minutes after
booting, I'm sure it's some sort of Windows indicator.

--
Terry R.

***Reply Note***
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Delete NOSPAM from the email address after clicking Reply.

 

[Blaine]

I've seen slow boot times, but I'm talking ridiculous time here. It takes
about 15-20 minutes to boot completely into windows. I did a boot log, but
don't really know if it contains anything helpful. A lot of "Loaded driver",
and a few "Did not load driver". Any utilities that may help?

 

[ju.c]

Could be your icon cache is corrupt, you can rebuild it either
automatically by installing Iconoid or manually using TweakUI
(install, open, under "Repair" select "Rebuild Icons" and click
the "Repair Now" button.


Iconoid 3.8.5 602 KB Freeware
Info: http://www.sillysot.com/download.htm
Download: http://www.sillysot.com/iconoid.zip

"What is Iconoid?

- Save and Restore Icon positions for each (or every) screen
resolution
- Transparent icon backgrounds or use any color
- Select any color for icon text
- Automatically hide icons when you don't need them and
show them when you do
- Automatically or manually select the best color for the text
background
- Quickly minimize all windows so that you can see your
desktop wallpaper.
- See the help files (which include screen shots) for even
more information."

or

Tweak UI 2.10 147 KB Freeware
Info: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx
Download: http://download.microsoft.com/downl...a6-b352-839afb2a2679/TweakUiPowertoySetup.exe

"This PowerToy gives you access to system settings that are
not exposed in the Windows XP default user interface,
including mouse settings, Explorer settings, taskbar settings,
and more.
Requires Windows XP Service Pack 1 or Windows Server 2003."


ju.c