pc takes forever to boot.

this for a pc and it takes 3 minutes or more to boot. here is
the specs and what i tried to fix it.

P3/850
512mb ram
10-15gb hard drive
dvdrom only
gf 256 video
sb live sound card
no nic
19" monitor acer
normal keyboard and mouse

1: had router, cable modem, nic in the pc.
2: install windows xp
3: booted fine, under 2 minutes easy. set up and it worked ok.
4: took out the nic cus it was mine and i needed it, but i had it there so
he could get on broadband for downloading all MS window updates instead of
over slow dial up modem.
5: pc now takes 3 or more minutes to boot. just sits there at the windows xp
logo screen with the scrolling left to right blue bar thingy. thinking maybe
it was looking for a network, but not find one is why it took so long.
6: put nic back in same problem.
7: reinstalled windows xp with no nic or anything.
8: still takes 3 minutes or so to boot and it should take less then 2 easy.
what is odd is first time i installed win xp it was fine, then took out nic,
not good. put back everything still slow boot time.

what's going on here? not running any start up programs or processes. just a
standard windows xp install.

 

Does it seem to delay at one specific part of the boot up process (e.g. the
Welcome screen) for a minute or 2? Or does it just seem to go consistently
slow the whole time?

 

you know the screen durring start up that has the windows logo and the bar
is scrolling left to right with those little squares? that screen is just
sitting there for 3 miutes or so and then finally loads the desktop. so i
guess that's the boot screen

 

For testing purposes; put your network-card back in and assign it a static
ip-address, and then see if it makes any difference to the boot-time.

 

Yes...that is probably the reason.

And the modem and router?

Partitioned and formatted?...or just installed over what you had?

You've got some network stuff still running.


Have a nice week...

Trent©

Dyslexics of the world ... UNTIE !

 

There is no network stuff running cus i told in my message i did a reformat
reinstall with nothing in it. that is the last thing i did.

 

Probably still looking for network. Remove everything networking.

 

there is no networking. no nic, no nothing.

 

You never said anything about a reformat...that's why I asked you.

Have you done a defrag yet?

If the defrag didn't/doesn't help, get a utility called

bootvis 1.3.37.msi

from the MSFT site...and run that.

Good luck.


Have a nice week...

Trent©

Dyslexics of the world ... UNTIE !

 

what i did was put in windows xp cd, reformat and install windows xp. it
takes 3 minutes to boot. why? no nic installed, no nothing. so a defrag wont
do a thing since i just installed windows and it takes forever to boot.

 

Somebody may have already suggested this.... put your network card back in
and see if it takes 3 minutes to boot.....

 

The problem here is i have already done that and it did take long time to
boot.

1: install windows with nic, router and cable modem. booted fine.
2: took nic out and it take long time to boot.
3: put nic in and still take long time to boot.
4: took nic out, reformat and install windows xp with nothing there.
still take long time to boot. so a fresh clean install with nothing there it
takes forever to boot. i don't know why.

 

Could this system perhaps have an in-built nic that you may have overlooked?

 

hi,

i have a feeling your harddrive is misbehaving!!!!

try another drive

good luck

 

nope, it has none onboard.

 

why do you think the drive might be weirding out?

 

It's not. If the HD was bad, you would either: a. hear it because the drive
would become very noisy, or b. Would not be able to boot at all. Or possibly
both.

 

possibly both

nonsense. There are a variety of situations where the drive could have
neither symptom you mentioned, yet could be going bad.

 

Really? Then enlighten me...

 

So you think drive failure symptoms are limited to noise, and bootup
failure?

1. bad sectors
Bad sectors can appear anywhere on the data surfaces of the drive. They
needn't be only in boot areas or even where critical system files reside,
and therefore wouldn't necessarily cause slow bootup, or a non-bootup
situation, yet they can be a sign of impending drive failure. Since they can
be anywhere, they may lie undiscovered until something attempts to write or
read data at that location. If the swapfile occupies a failing area of the
drive, it can result in crashes.

2. Logic board malfunction
The drive's logic board can experience problems that may, or may not exhibit
themselves exclusively as boot up problems. They could result in any number
of the following issues.

4. Excessive Spin-up time
5. read error rates
6. write error rates
7. Seek error rates
8. CRC error count

just to name a few.

Many of these are items that SMART monitoring is designed to check, and if
they move out of spec, they can trigger a SMART alert that may indicate that
the drive may be on it's way out. Often times, SMART predicts imminent drive
failure, before any obvious symptoms (like the two you mentioned) even
appear. This is predicted by looking at several other indicators of the
drive's fitness, and performance that aren't necessarily obvious or
noticeable to the user. So you can see that there are a number of things
that can be out of whack that can indicate a failure or impending failure,
yet no noise, or bootup failure has yet occurred. A harddrive can go "bad"
without ever experiencing a boot failure, or excessive noise.