Windows hanging at startup

When my comuter is loading Windows it will hang at the splash screen. The taskbar goes to about halfway and then sits there for about 30 seconds.

I've got a fairly quick 2GHz system with 256 MB of RAM, so I don't think it's bogging down trying to load windows. It was a clean install on a brand new hard drive as well. So there can't be any conflicts with previous OS's.

 

Domain, workgroup, small home LAN, stand-alone?

SP?

Check your event logs. Depending on how early in the boot process this is happening, it may well be writing details to the event logs.

 

It's a stand alone setup. The only networking it has is a cable modem.

Which logs should I look for? Is it bootlog.txt like Windows 98 has? Windows 2000 is new to me.

 

The 2K event logs are much better than the text file you have seen in the past. For one thing, it is updated any time your PC is running rather than just showing some boot-up information. For another, the events it traps are much more extensive than 9X can show you and shown with lots more detail.

Several ways to get to them. My preference is to right-click the My Computer icon, select manage~event viewer. You will have three sections; system, security, applications. May be information of interest in any or all.

I usually set the filter to only show problems (i.e., uncheck the "information" and "success audit" sections). This doesn't remove any entries but does stop you from having to look thru them while you are troubleshooting.

Also probably a good idea to set to show most recent first.

 

If the cable modem is a PCI NIC it'll slow down a bit as it checks out any other machines on the "network ". It's normal to see a sight slowdown in boot times with a network card installed.

Of course, if the cable modem is USB that blows my theory out the water!

C