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My computer has started to take a long time to boot up, shut down and
reboot.

When it starts it will pause just after the boot screen appears for up
to 20 seconds, no hard drive activity and the scrolling bar does not
slow down or freeze. Same happens when it shuts down, hard drive
activity, a pause of 10-20 seconds, then more activity before it
switches off.

I've used HijackThis to see what is loading and can't see anything that
shouldn't be.

Is there anyway to find out what is causing the delay?


Using XP Pro SP3, 500MB RAM, Avast and Avira antivirus which are both
on-demand only and the pagefile is set to a max/min of 500MB.

Get rid of those antivirus programs. They're for newbies. That's what's
causing all your problems.

Iapetus wrote:

> My computer has started to take a long time to boot up, shut down and
> reboot.
>
> When it starts it will pause just after the boot screen appears for up
> to 20 seconds, no hard drive activity and the scrolling bar does not
> slow down or freeze. Same happens when it shuts down, hard drive
> activity, a pause of 10-20 seconds, then more activity before it
> switches off.
>
> I've used HijackThis to see what is loading and can't see anything that
> shouldn't be.
>
> Is there anyway to find out what is causing the delay?
>
> Using XP Pro SP3, 500MB RAM, Avast and Avira antivirus which are both
> on-demand only and the pagefile is set to a max/min of 500MB.

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Iapetus <> wrote in news:gb54ng$901$:

> My computer has started to take a long time to boot up, shut down and
> reboot.
>
> When it starts it will pause just after the boot screen appears for up
> to 20 seconds, no hard drive activity and the scrolling bar does not
> slow down or freeze. Same happens when it shuts down, hard drive
> activity, a pause of 10-20 seconds, then more activity before it
> switches off.
>
You say "boot screen". Do you mean the "starting windows XP" screen. This
is commonly (although there is no rule here) called the "splash" screen.
Some people call the the desktop background the "boot screen", hence my
asking for clairification.

If the above assumption by me is correct, the hard drive would be my first
guess - and it *is* that at this point, with no real facts to go on. Try
running a scandisk of your harddrive - thorough *without* fixing errors.
That is do a sector scan. If it finds any bad sectors, the odds are
excellent your hard drive is on it's last legs.

> I've used HijackThis to see what is loading and can't see anything that
> shouldn't be.
>
Never assume malware are the most likely cause of slowdowns. Programs,
yes. Try disabling startup completely start->run->msconfig and disable the
"startup group" apply and restart. See if that makes it faster. If it
does, *leave* it off, none are necessary for anything but trivial reasons.

> Using XP Pro SP3, 500MB RAM, Avast and Avira antivirus which are both
> on-demand only and the pagefile is set to a max/min of 500MB.
>
Allow windows to change the pagefile size as needed, you *might* be
running out of RAM. 1 Gig is not a lot these days. And you updated your
data files for the AV software *just* before you ran a full scan on *all*
files on your harddrive? Otherwise, this hasn't been eliminated either.


--
(setq (chuck nil) car(chuck) )

On Sun, 21 Sep 2008 10:38:51 +0100, Iapetus wrote:

>My computer has started to take a long time to boot up, shut down and
>reboot.

<snip>

>I've used HijackThis to see what is loading and can't see anything that
>shouldn't be.

The event logs?

>Is there anyway to find out what is causing the delay?

Maybe
http://www.greatis.com/utilities/bootlogxp/
30 day free trial

>Using XP Pro SP3, 500MB RAM, Avast and Avira antivirus which are both

500MB isn't a lot to work with, more RAM will help.

>on-demand only and the pagefile is set to a max/min of 500MB.

Set to auto.

Me