Windows 2000 & MS Word 2k Printing And Speed Issues

Hi all,

I have a 933MHz P3 with plenty of RAM running Windows 2000 and it takes about 3 whole minutes to boot up. Is there any way to decrease the time it takes to boot and log me in? It's acting as though it was using a 233MHz processor instead.

The other issue is with printing. I have a Brother HL-1240 hooked up to a network print server. When I tried installing the Brother driver for it, Windows asked for two flopplies with fonts. I bought the printer brand new and it didn't come with any floppies at all. Just for kicks, I called Brother and asked them if my model required any floppies and they said no too. In place of the Brother driver, I'm using that of an HP Laserjet II series printer. When I try printing a Word document, the title bar flashes continuously and essentially freezes the computer. At that point, I hit ctrl-alt-del and go to the Task Manager. As soon as Task Manager comes up, Word goes back to normal and has the print dialogue ready for me. Then I close Task Manager and continue on my merry way. How can I avoid the whole ctrl-alt-del thing and just print normally? I know that it does this because of the printer driver thing, but there's got to be a way to fool it!

Thanks in advance.
Katrina

 

Hi katrinak and welcome. Sorry about the slow response but weekends are just that way sometimes.

First the printer issue - lots of folks have found that the 1240 drivers and Win2K just don't like each other. Some have had good luck using the 1260 drivers though. Printer seemed to work fine for them. You'd think that as common as your problem was the tech support folks at Brother would have mentioned this. The 1260 drivers should be available from the standard 2K CD.

Slow booting - since the easiest way to troubleshoot this sort of issue is to stop things from loading at start time but Microsoft somehow left msconfig off NT4 and 2K, go Here and get the .exe and help file shown for 2000. They are the ones from XP and they work perfectly on 2000.

Once you have the .exe loaded, stop everything shown as loading at startup. If that speeds things up, add them back one at a time until you find the problem item and if it's one you absolutely, positively gotta have load when you boot up, say what it is and there may be options that will help.

 

Hi Newt, thanks for the reply.

I have to kick myself for not thinking of using another Brother driver in place of the 1240. What a day!

Regarding the startup time, well, it's still standing around 3 minutes. That's about 120 seconds more than I'd like. This time doesn't change at all even when I tell it to only load the two essential services at boot (RPC and RPC Locator). I guess I'll just have to leave it on day and night and pray that it doesn't do anything stupid while I sleep.

Katrina

 

LOL - kicking oneself is sort of a hobby with some of us. I do it fairly regularly.

Startup woes that persist with very little running at startup - Hmmmmmm.

Try opening a cmd window and

Code:

chkdsk /r

on your system drive.

If no help (and you might be interested in looking at the event that writes all the results of that in your event logs) then a defrag. NTFS rarely suffers like that although it can but FAT is prone to snarf and bark and slow down if you are very fragged.

If still no help,

Code:

sfc /scannow

from the start~run line.

If it's still slow, post back since there are other checks and tweaks but the above are simplest. Load time that is lots longer than it used to be with no obvious cause is worrying.

 

Neither of those resulted in anything great. The latter of the two landed me with a gazillion CD read type errors regarding a pile of DLLs. I couldn't stand to click another series of "Files that are needed for Windows to run properly must be copied to the DLL cache." *inserts CD at prompt* "Retry/More Info/Cancel ". I kept hitting cancel cause if it can't read the darn thing the first time, it probably never will.Then another never-ending dialogue with "If you cancel, Windows might require you to insert a CD later. Are you sure you want to skip this file?" At which point I'd hit the "yes" button and hope that it would just choke and die. I've concluded that (a) it can't read or (b) I have a crappy disc. Either way, I'm ready to shoot the thing.

What's next?

 

The results of the sfc scan may have pinpointed the problem. The CD drive may have gone sour on you. Either that or you have a bad install CD or one of those horrible 'recovery CD' things.

If you take the CD drive out (well, unplugging the cables will do fine) and start the PC, does it work at normal speed?

 

Hi katrinak...

Go into your BIOS and see if you got your floppy first in boot order. If so change it to 2nd or 3rd. Make sure your HDD is first. Also turn off "Floppy Drive Seek ". That should save you a few nano seconds...

Run a CHKDSK as Newt suggested then Defrag HDD.

Some Links on subject...
- http://www.pcguide.com/opt/opt/bootSpeed-c.html
- http://www.blackviper.com/WIN2K/servicecfg.htm
- http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-GB;835557