Wierd Slow Boot Problem

Hi wcuboy - and Welcome to the Board

Once the PC is booted does it work OK - normal speed, etc?

How long has this problem been with you - one of the updates released in April - 811493 slowed down computers all over the place. The current version released on May 28 is OK. Did you update before or after this date?

If before May 28 uninstall 811493 and install the May 28 version from update.

Your laptop spec is a bit low for XP to fly. 128 Mb ram is very low for XP - 256 Mb considered to be the minimum for reasonable performance.

Suggest you do a good cleanup on the hard drive - to save me typing go to this post :
http://www.windowsbbs.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=18359&highlight=sound+problems and follow Mike's instructions for 'Cleanup good!' - second post.

 

I guess you are unfamiliar with Windows XP?

The black screen between the Windows logo and the Welcome screen is perfectly normal - un-nerving though it may be to the first time user.

For comparision I just booted :

My main PC "“ 1,53 Ghz Athlon with 1 Gb RAM aboard "“ 16 seconds between screens.

My standby PC - 933 Mhz PIII with 256 Mb RAM aboard - 13 seconds between screens.

These 2 PC’s share the same monitor, CRT not LCD so there is the "˜boot up "˜ time for the monitor to take into account.

My laptop - 1.2 Ghz Celeron with 512 Mb RAM aboard - 5 seconds between the screens. The LCD screen is almost instantaneous, unlike a CRT.

All are running XP Pro with all the updates although the standby is SP 1 with no further updates.

I don’t think you have a problem "“ as I said in my first post your spec is on the low side for things to happen quickly in XP "“ and boot up is one of them.

I recently installed XP Pro on a friend’s old IBM laptop "“ PII with 64 Mb of RAM "“ that took an eternity to boot, but it got there.

At least you have a 'clean' m/c now and that will add a bit of speed.

On tip to speed things up generally - turn off Indexing Service by removing it through Add/Remove Programs - Windows Components. This hogs resources and disk usage - all Indexing Services does is to rearrange files on the drive so that they can be found quicker - it is simply not worth the drain on resources.