extremely slow start up?

P

PCaphobe

New Member
Hi all,

Newbie here. My home PC - which is now about 5 years old, has started to become EXTREMELY slow to start up. The scrolling blue bar screen takes between 2 and 4 minutes to get through, a further 20 seconds or so to then go through to the choose user / log-in screen then at least a minute of churning before it's "usable".

When it was new it was a reasonably high spec system, 1gb DDR2 ram, santa cruz sound, Nvidia Geforce 6800GS OC 512mb graphics card, can't for the life of me remember the CPU right now though :p

I've tried defrag, cleaning the registry, disabling all on startup... no change, it sits there trundling along like it hasn't a care in the world :(

Any idea's? I'm no pro by ANY stretch of the imagination - the above pretty much drained my knowledgebase!!
 
what operating system xp? it sounds like your install is becomming bugged. if it's an option you could try a fresh install of windows. that should fix you up. as to what exactly is causing the problem, i'm not sure but i am relatively sure it's the operating system since you said it takes for ever at the "blue bar" it must sit there waiting for something until that something times out.
 
LOL can't believe I forgot to mention that bit.... yes it is XP.

Thanks for the reply - I've never done an OS re-install. Believe it or not this is my first PC (always been Mac based in the past). How involved is it?

This is probably a REALLY stupid question, but if I'm re-installing the OS, will I have to re-install every bit of software on the PC as well? Could be problematic if I do as I've got a fair bit and the majority of the original CD's are somewhere in a box in storage (house moves-oh the joy!)
 
yeah, you'd have to reinstall your software. but really the part where windows installs is pretty easy. the hardest part is finding drivers for all of your hardware if windows xp doesn't have them and you don't have the origonal disc's that came with the stuff. If you have all the origonal discs and stuff it's really pretty easy. As long as you can read and understand what it's asking you as you go through the setup.
 
So long as after the fresh install you can get to the internet one can find most any driver there via download too
 
good point, but where xp doesn't have all that good of support for wireless adapters it does do well with wired adapters.
 
thanks for all your help guys - looks like I'll have to just put up with it for a while then till I have everything out of storage - think I'd rather buy a new PC than dig through that lot at the moment!!!
 
maybe there are simply to many programs starting to run on windows startup.. You know all those antiviruses, internet connection, messengers and etc.. if you have tons of such stuff your pc will never start up fast.
 
yeah but it's something with the os because he said that he disabled all of that stuff. That and it pauses before that stuff even begins to load.
 
indeed - even with everything disabled exactly the same result. I've started looking for most of the disks but doing so has led me even closer to discovering just how far this PC can fly from a second storey window....

just to make things even more joyous, I ran another registry cleaner, after which I now get the HP Fax install error poking it's head up every time I start the thing!!! How lovely.
 
Sorted!!!

Thanks for all the help chaps, but I've finally got it sorted - and it came from something totally unexpected!

I was surfing for help with a problem a friend was having, with AVG running very slowly, when I came across this article:

http://winhlp.com/?q=node/10

on a MS security patch causing the hard drives to revert to PIO instead of DMA. I checked mine "just on the off chance" and would you believe... PIO. Followed the instructions in the link and it now starts inside 15 seconds and is running a treat :D

Not only that, I've found 2 family members and several of the works PC's also suffering the same problems.

I imagine this is something you more knowledgable people already know about, but thought I'd best post just in case it helps someone else with a terminally slow PC!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top