Long, unexplained pause during boot

Hi. When I boot (XP Home) it takes up to 3.5 - 4 minutes from user logon before everything has settled down and the system is ready to accept input. So I got suspicious and opened Task Manager as soon as I possibly could to see what was going down. The CPU Usage graphic (I'm on an Italian system, so some of these expressions may not translate to exactly what you guys are used to) shows an almost flat line (hovering around 1% to 4% and back again) for a long time, and then suddenly takes off and the HD starts rocking and rolling. Looking at the Processes tab in TaskMan, during that startup time there are around 16 processes loaded, but the only item moving is System Idle Cycle, which clocks up about 3 minutes of idle time. Then suddenly it decides it's kept me waiting long enough and loads another 10 or so processes in quick succession and everything takes off. I don't know what the various columns on the Processes tab mean, so I don't know which to monitor for activity, but I can see various small changes happening here and there out of the corner of my eye scattered all over the page.

Is this normal? Do I just need to be patient and live with it (no huge sweat), or is there something I can do to convince it to keep moving and stop wasting my time? Grateful for any comment and a good weekend to you.

 

Hello Geoffrey,

You can use this old MS tool to analyze the boot up sequence/time - but do not use it to fix the boot up - analysis only.

http://www.helpwithwindows.com/WindowsXP/tune-19.html

Regards - Charles

 

Thanks, Charles - I'll give it a try and report back...

 

Well, I tried that. But three times in a row it gave me the error-message "Number of physical drives in the trace file is 0. Trace file has invalid system configuration information ", so I didn't get very far :-[

I used to have a smart little app called, I believe, Bootlog.exe, but after upgrading from W98SE I found it wasn't compatible any more and ditched it. Pity the author didn't update it for XP.

The help file you pointed me to (and yes, it is heavy going for an amateur like me!) had a lot of useful info, and I'm going to try cleaning up my BIOS settings by using it. Apart from that, I'll keep a trace on this post in case you or anyone else has any more kindly advice.