Excessive Boot Time

[Steve Giannoni]

Pentium IV running Windows XP taking about 5 minutes to completely
boot. What could be causing this, and how to fix ?! ...

 

[Bert Hyman]

In Steve Giannoni

Pentium IV

What speed?

How much memory?

running Windows XP taking about 5 minutes to completely
boot. What could be causing this, and how to fix ?! ...

What services are starting automatically? Do you need them all?

Is your anti-virus program configured to do some sort of scan at boot
time?

There are probably better places to ask this question, since it's
probably not entirely related to your hardware.

 

[J G Miller]

Pentium IV running Windows XP taking about 5 minutes to completely boot.
What could be causing this, and how to fix ?! ..

Your PC could have been taken over by a BotNet and in those 5 minutes is
sending out thousands of SPAM e-mail messages.

On the other hand, the cause could be lots of other things.

 

[Steve Giannoni]

In Steve Giannoni


What speed? 2.4

How much memory? 768

What services are starting automatically? Do you need them all?

Only needed services started automatically.

Is your anti-virus program configured to do some sort of scan at boot
time? No

There are probably better places to ask this question, since it's
probably not entirely related to your hardware.

Many thanks for responding ...

 

[123Jim]

Pentium IV running Windows XP taking about 5 minutes to completely
boot. What could be causing this, and how to fix ?! ...

Take a look at the programs that are starting on boot ... I like to use
sysinternals autoruns for this.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902.aspx

Autoruns makes it easy to see what is starting on boot, and lets you stop
any process starting on boot. You can stop the processes which are non
essential.

In addition your memory is not exactly generous at 768 MB .. If you add 2
Gig you will notice a difference in performance, including time taken to
boot.

someone already mentioned malware .. make sure your system is clean .. scan
with Superantispyware for example.

 

[Andy]

Pentium IV running Windows XP taking about 5 minutes to completely
boot. What could be causing this, and how to fix ?! ...

As others have said, it could be a lot of things so here's my suggestion. On
my XP pc, an incorrectly configured network card was stalling the boot
process for a couple of extra minutes. Do you have any add-on cards
installed?


Andy

 

[GT]

Pentium IV running Windows XP taking about 5 minutes to completely
boot. What could be causing this, and how to fix ?! ...

One unusual suggestion, but worth a look - will take 2 minutes to check...

Check your device manager and make sure the hard disk controller and hard
disk are using the correct DMA settings - I've seen faults in a Dell laptop
DVD drive that forced the controller down to a very slow DMA settings -
perhaps something similar has happenned.

 

[Steve Giannoni]

Perhaps not surprisingly, boot is very fast to safe mode ...