Logon Takes Forever

[Guest]

I have a Dell Latitude CPi running XP Professional with 256 MB of RAM. When I
start it up and log on it takes an incredibly long time (four minutes on
average, I've timed it). It shows the "loading your personal settings" screen
for about 30 seconds and then the desktop background but without any icons or
taskbar for about 3 1/2 minutes. Any ideas or suggestions would help, this is
driving me insane.

 

[JS]

Check the amount of free space on the drive.
If it low then try to free up space by cleaning the drive of Windows
temporary files, IE temp files, Etc.

JS

 

[Malke]

I have a Dell Latitude CPi running XP Professional with 256 MB of RAM.
When I start it up and log on it takes an incredibly long time (four
minutes on average, I've timed it). It shows the "loading your
personal settings" screen for about 30 seconds and then the desktop
background but without any icons or taskbar for about 3 1/2 minutes.
Any ideas or suggestions would help, this is driving me insane.

1. If you can increase the RAM to at least 512MB that would be good.
Refer to your manual or Dell's website for the correct RAM to buy.
Another good source of RAM information is www.crucial.com

2. Make sure the computer is completely virus/malware-free:
http://www.elephantboycomputers.com/page2.html#Removing_Malware

3. Control the programs that are starting with Windows:

How to Troubleshoot By Using the Msconfig Utility in Windows XP -
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=310560

Some places to look up what you find with msconfig:

http://aumha.org/a/loads.htm - What loads at Startup?
http://castlecops.com/StartupList.html
http://www.pacs-portal.co.uk/startup_index.htm
http://www.theeldergeek.com/services_guide.htm
http://www.liutilities.com/products/wintaskspro/processlibrary/
http://www.windowsstartup.com/wso/search.php

4. Also see:

http://www.elephantboycomputers.com/page2.html#Maintenance
http://www3.telus.net/dandemar/slowcom.htm
http://aumha.org/a/health.htm - Take Out the Trash

Malke

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

I have a Dell Latitude CPi running XP Professional with 256 MB of
RAM. When I start it up and log on it takes an incredibly long time
(four minutes on average, I've timed it). It shows the "loading your
personal settings" screen for about 30 seconds and then the desktop
background but without any icons or taskbar for about 3 1/2 minutes.
Any ideas or suggestions would help, this is driving me insane.

Each to his own, but I don't think four minutes is "an incredibly long
time."

My personal view is that the attention many people pay to how long it takes
to boot is unwarranted. Assuming that the computer's speed is otherwise
satisfactory, it may not be worth worrying about. Most people start their
computers once a day or even less frequently. In the overall scheme of
things, even a few minutes to start up isn't very important. Personally I
power on my computer when I get up in the morning, then go get my coffee.
When I come back, it's done booting. I don't know how long it took to boot
and I don't care.

However if you do want to address it, it may be because of what programs
start automatically, and you may want to stop some of them from starting
that way. On each program you don't want to start automatically, check its
Options to see if it has the choice not to start (make sure you actually
choose the option not to run it, not just a "don't show icon" option). Many
can easily and best be stopped that way. If that doesn't work, run MSCONFIG
from the Start | Run line, and on the Startup tab, uncheck the programs you
don't want to start automatically.

However, if I were you, I wouldn't do this just for the purpose of running
the minimum number of programs. Despite what many people tell you, you
should be concerned, not with how *many* of these programs you run, but
*which*. Some of them can hurt performance severely, but others have no
effect on performance.

Don't just stop programs from running willy-nilly. What you should do is
determine what each program is, what its value is to you, and what the cost
in performance is of its running all the time. You can get more information
about these at http://castlecops.com/StartupList.html. If you can't find it
there, try google searches and ask about specifics here.

Once you have that information, you can make an intelligent informed
decision about what you want to keep and what you want to get rid of.