Boot Issues

Recently, my computer has rather slow booting up. it usually took 10 seconds to get from the desktop appearing to having anti-virus and firewall loaded. Explorer, IE, and Opera started crashing randomly as well.

Then it started taking a minute or more, and now it occasionally freezes while loading up the desktop. Once it showed a system boot error, i.e. "Invalid system disk. Insert disk and reboot ", but I got to windows on the 3rd reboot.

The only icons in my tray are: McAfee Security Center, Sygate Firewall, Steam, Safely Remove Hardware, and a network status icon. I have Quicktime, iTunes, a Zip Drive, and all the start services that come with these programs.

I recently installed a lot of Half-Life related games, about a few gigabytes worth. And to try to remedy the slow boot, I opened services.msc in Run and disabled a few services, such as Zero Wireless Configuration and fast User Switching that I don't need.

I've scanned for malware and this seems like it's becoming a bigger problem.

 

i'd be very concerned about the boot error. this is normally a really bad sign. check u'r event logs for disk hits as this one may be headed down hill. HW does break ... anyway ... ignoring such is at one's peril.

get a good backup or two asap

as to the delay, most of current games require an online part that autostarts. i'd choose to remove the auto part and just start em manually prior to playing but ... i don't know the ins/outs on the games specifically. HL is one that will not run for the most part w/o this online component - short of a some hack of course

i'd also ask when the zip drive went in. IOMega has always been a personal headache to me ... there's just a bunch of stuff required to autostart that makes me decide against the device every time i see one ... they don't hold enuff data to compared to a cdr/dvdr in my book so ... why use them at all?

 

Have you run chkdsk/f ?

 

It's clear of malware. I was saying the boot issues were getting more troublesome.

Steam needs to be started and be able to phone home before one can play Half-Life. I kept Steam from starting automatically from msconfig, but the most infuriating part is it had a "-silent" as part of the command. I got the USB1 Zip drive about a year ago, so it's probaly not the problem. I still have some records and data on a few old disks.

The last time I got a boot error was when the registry got corrupted.

chkdsk/f? What does it do?

 

chkdsk checks for disk errors. chkdsk /f checks and corrects (fixes) the error. You should be logged on as Administrator to run this command from Command Prompt.