Extremely slow boot up

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hi

can anyone help pls

my xp machine is extremely slow in booting, gets stuck for several mins at the xp screen with the progress bar below.

have just finished removing malware but am going through the steps again, including defrag and selective startup option [no services and no startup items checked], and crap cleaner

c: hd free space is low at 3.5 gb

thanks

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Qaz, could you post the spec’s of your machine? How much Ram, how big is the HD compared to the free space, how old is the drive? Is it slow booting up in Safe Mode?

Not withstanding those questions, 3.5 GB free sounds like one possible possible problem: Windows needs some headroom on the disk to be able to run effectively, moving files a round and housekeeping etc. The other thing that may be happening is, if the drive is very old or badly looked after, it may have a number of errors further degrading it’s performance.

Depending on the answers to the first line above, you could try running a chkdsk to look for errors, or there may be other factors at work.

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You might also try What’s In Startupto find out how many un-neccessary apps are starting with Windows. I have just 4, AV/AM, laptop touchpad, S/W firewall and my mouse software. That’s it. Most S/W you install will try to place itself in Windows startup un-neccessarily. Just stop it. You might find a marked improvement.

I would also clear up as many temp folders as you can find, including temp internet files. Uninstall any old apps you don’t need or use, using Revo Uninstaller. Some of these take up a lot of HD space. If you have hibernate enabled, disable it in Power Management, then delete the hiberfil.sys fileas this can be very large

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I had the same problem after about 5 years of continuous use. A backup, wipe and re-install fixed it.

cheers, Paul

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I agree with Tinto that we need you specs. Years ago 512 mb was plenty of memory. Lately I’ve found XP systems need 1 Gig of memory to keep from constantly paging back and forth between memory and the hard disk, slowing things down to a crawl. I have upgrade several XP systems with more memory recently with good results.

Jerry

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i will try to ansswer all questions:

its a 28 gb hd, now with 8 gb free sace
amd 1.8 cpu
memory 1014
drive is old [not known]
chkdisk ran twice but kept dissapearing after a while . question: does it dissapear when finished?
have disabled hibernate althought i not used it for a few years. a search cant find hiberfil.sys fileto delete
I only have several programs in statup now , pruned them yesterday.

no improvement, a full 5 min to boot to desktop, then another min plus to get stuff loaded to task bar, then 4 min to load firefox 5 , and about same asa i recall for thunderbird.

i would reinstall xp but i have no disk and am close to getting my new machine.

i read that theres a defrag boot files registry entry which may have got turned off….i couldnt find it!

the speed is no better in safe mode or selective startup with everything turned off

have looked at temp folders , mostly emty or low content
thanx

ps i get> warning f peramiter not specified running checkdisk in read only mode. and i can confirm now that checkdisk does disappear before it finishes

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OK, looking at those spec’s it’s not a rocket ship, but then you already knew that anyway.

I think the key thing is that it suffers from the same poor performance when booting into Safe Mode as in Normal Mode. That being the case, it’s not (or rather unlikely to be) a service or driver problem. Much more likely to be the age of the Hard Drive, it now being error prone and perhaps starting to wear.

You mention that it is a 28GB drive. Drives of that size were prevalent about 9 or 10 years ago. Should your drive be that old, it is time to take an image copy, replace it with a new parallel ATA drive and burn the image back onto the new drive.

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yes, its no rocket for sure, it wouldnt win any prizes for looks either as its got no front or side panels and the external switches long gone, just bare wires. but before i replace [temporarily] the hd would u comment on the items below, it will make me that little bit more knowledgable.

i did finally check the disk but approached from tools>error checking. it ran but in the morning there was no message. is that normal?

i read that theres a defrag boot files registry entry which may have got turned off, could this be a this as a possible cause

can i confirm the hd condition with software , before i replace it?

thanks

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yes, its no rocket for sure, it wouldnt win any prizes for looks either as its got no front or side panels and the external switches long gone, just bare wires. but before i replace [temporarily] the hd would u comment on the items below, it will make me that little bit more knowledgable.

i did finally check the disk but approached from tools>error checking. it ran but in the morning there was no message. is that normal?

i read that theres a defrag boot files registry entry which may have got turned off, could this be a this as a possible cause

can i confirm the hd condition with software , before i replace it?

thanks

[*]No message after chkdsk? Yes this would be normal if you performed it at boot time. It will run the check disk, then re-boot, so any error messages will be lost. Best to watch it if you are using chkdsk: it should take too long with a 28GB drive.

[*]Defrag boot files setting in the registry? I’ve not heard of that and I’m not sure what it would be. There are many files used at boot time, so it’s unclear what defragmenting them would do compared to the normal defrag. A possibility is that this may refer to the pagefile being highly fragmented. Check using the standard windows defrag tool to see if there are lots of “unmovable objects”. If so, then you may need to run a special pagefile defrag.

[*]Conform the HD condition before replace? The best tools to use would be from the manufacturer, so look on their websites for hard drive checking tools. They will likely use SMART reporting technology, which due to its age your dive will probably not support; so they may not work. Failing that, take a look at this MajorGeeks page for lots of disk tools.

To be honest however, if the drive is 9 years old, it’s time to swap it out anyway as it is at the end of it’s working life.

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thanks very much for your wisdom [everyone], got a temp drive coming this w/end

mark

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Check the Event Viewer for the chkdsk log.
Go to Start > Run and type: eventvwr.msc /s , and hit enter.
When Event Viewer opens, click on “Application”,
then scroll down to “Winlogon” and double-click on it.
This is the log created after running Checkdisk.

Jerry

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I recently got a service call on a six year old PC, with Windows XP-Home on it, that had never had any service / maintenance done on it in its lifetime.
To say that the boot-up and everything else was slow, would be the Under-statement of the year.
Just clicking on a desktop icon, would give you time for a coffee break before you’d see anything new appear on the screen.

I booted up in SAFE MODE and went right to MSCONFIG and deleted everything in the Startup folder.
Then under Boot.ini I set the startup delay to 3 seconds, from the default 30 seconds. The PC had dual Processors but it was set to just ONE. I fixed that.

Then I went into Add/Remove programs and UN-Installed all the Spyware that had come with the PC, and everything else that the customer said he never used.

Then I ran Disk Cleanup in the Extended mode and took out a huge amount of junk files.
Then I ran my own XPCleanup.bat program and took out a lot more junk.

Finally after doing the cleanup, I booted back into normal mode and was able to start tweaking and tuning XP for optimum performance. As I worked, the customer was sitting right there, amazed at the improvements I was making.
Finally, when I was all done, removing viruses, trojans and spyware, the old PC booted up in about 45 seconds and shut down in 10 seconds, and when I’d click on something it would pop up immediately.

Cleaning up a DIRTY PC is not Rocket Science, but it does require some knowledge and some effort.

Cheers Mates!
The Doctor 😎

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i cant find the “winlogon”

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In the event viewer, highlight Applications, then click on the Source column header to sort that column alphabetically. scroll down to find winlogon. Alternatively, With Applications highlighted, click on View > Find. In the Event Source box select Winlogon and then click next.

Jerry

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thats all done now with ur help, thanks. the disc is failing but everything is backed up safely.

Dose anyone know if i can get my xp instalation cd which is not bootable, to boot by first booting with my win 2000 cd. previuosly i have fully installed win 2000 first, which is a pain.

i have cd burner xp and iso buster, perhaps one of those could make a bootable iso . have looked and tryed but its a bit tricky

thanks

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I know this is probably a silly question to ask but ,have you tried changing the boot sequence to allow your cd to boot first in the bios .then try to install from your xp cd.
If I recall correctly , it may as simple as hitting F8 at boot up and selecting “cd as the first boot device” from the boot menu and it will more than likely return to boot from hard drive at the next boot up.
Failing that you should get someone to make you a windows boot floppy to install cd drivers first then try your CD install of xp .
I hope this helps.

Rob

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Hi all, this is a very common situation from the research I have seen over the last few months. I had the exact same thing happen to a test rig that was running XP pro SP3. This was a relatively new machine, quad core Amd 2,8Ghz, 4 Gigs of ram, SATA boot drive 160Gig with 120 free space. The OS had been running for several months with no problems, all patches up to date, etc.

One morning after coming in to check the progress of some overnight downloads, (machine runs 24/7), my MS wireless laser
mouse refused to respond, keyboard hotkeys had to be used to restart the system. Upon restart, the boot process took upwards of 15 minutes!.

Hitting the forums including this site, and trying every trick I could find including all on this thread, plus all from every Windows book I owned and I own a lot, NOTHING would make the machine load any faster than 7 minutes. And that included loading the Soluto program and cutting all boot items and services.

I have been building and installing windows since 1986, and I had no idea why this unusual situation was occurring. The only thing that was standing out was that there was some Win updates that had occurred on that night, and done w/o my permission, as I have all my updates set for me to choose what to load. I had scanned the system with over 20 different rootkit killers, anti-malware, anti-virus, reg-scanners, etc, with zero problems found. I even manually scanned the registry for any evidence of malicious alterations. Zilch!

The end result was that I had no choice but to re-image the drive with a several month old image. Problem was immediately solved, current boot times are just over 1 minute, and that’s with a full boat load of startup items, over 20 at current count, no custom boot, just letting Windows manage the process. The machine has been stable for the last two months, still online 24/7 except for patch related restarts.

I know this was a long post but I wanted to share that the hardware issues the guy talked about, I feel, do not apply to the problem. I have hard drives that still work from the ’80’s, they are kept in shape by SpinRite, and monitored by HDD Health, and they are in great shape, still used for software testing, mule systems, etc. I have run XP successfully on machines with as little as 512M of ram and have no issues with performance after eliminating some of the bloat inherent in the Windows system.

I feel there is an issue with the updates that were installed. I now test the updates and am prepared to rollback at any sign of instability. Take of this what you will, but it is my experience. FTR, I have used every version of Windows from 3 to 7, on 286sx processors to i7 Intels and everything in between, and have extensive experience in securing and tweaking systems.

Hopefully I can contribute more to these forums in the future as time allows, just sorry I did not see this thread sooner, as I feel the guy’s pain. It’s really frustrating when Windows decides to go walk-a-bout for no apparent reason. Cheers all!

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There are a few web sites that will show you how to create a bootable XP CD. nlite should also do it for youi, whilst including SP3.

cheers, Paul

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i looked at N lite but it seems u need to have windows installed first. so its back tyo my orioginal question:

Dose anyone know if i can get my xp instalation cd which is not bootable, to boot by first booting with my win 2000 cd. previuosly i have fully installed win 2000 first, which is a pain.

i have cd burner xp and iso buster, perhaps one of those could make a bootable iso . have looked and tryed but its a bit tricky

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What Anti-Virus System are you running? After a period Norton can hog your resources so badly that my comp took nearly 10 minutes to get to the desktop! I have since scrapped all Norton on my home PC’s and use Avast and MSE. I used Norton between 2002-2007 and since changing I have normal start up on all comps.
You would benefit from a larger HDD.

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After you get all the fixes done, there is a very good (and safe) free application called soluto (soluto.com) that you should consider. It’s an app that runs during the OS bootloader, and watches what is being loaded. It will then give you the details including time for each, and you can then use it to set each item as 1) leave in boot, 2) delay, or 3) pause. Delay means just that… soluto will load it slightly later after the OS has fully booted- thus to you it looks like you just shaved time off the boot. Pause means it is never started by the bootloader process. Obviously you need to choose carefully, but the soluto app also provides advice for well known processes, and it also knows not to let you pause or delay critical OS services and features, plus anything you do is easily undone. Give it a try… I knocked 2+ minutes off of a 5 minute boot process on a very old, slow laptop running XP SP3.

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thanks, ill get on it
mark

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How did you get an installation CD that is not bootable?

Joe

--Joe

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looks like i need to have the os already installed to use Nlite, i could copy the existing instalation with Nlite but this instalation is crap [bits missing i suspect]. So as this disc is failing fast i want to install xp on my new tempory disc. And its back to my original question which is:

Dose anyone know if i can get my xp instalation cd which is not bootable, to boot by first booting with my win 2000 cd. previuosly i have fully installed win 2000 first, which is a pain. i have cd burner xp and iso buster, perhaps one of those could make a bootable iso, have looked and tryed to make bootable cd but its a bit tricky and i have not discovered how to do it properly

thanks

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In my experience any installation CD/DVD has been bootable. Why is yours not bootable?

Joe

--Joe

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maybe u are thinking of official ms cd’s, this is not. it came with the second hand machine , it works

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At this stage, it might be worthwhile standing back and looking at the wider picture. You have a rig which is 8 or 9 years old with a failing hard drive. Your data is backed up. You have a “grey” XP disk and need to install but only have a Win2000 CD.

If you were successful and managed install and activate XP on the box, you still need to import your data and will still be running on very old hardware which may fail at any time.

In my humble opinion, I think your time might be spent better by looking at low-end Windows 7 machines. They will blow the socks off the XP box and be fully legal.

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Might check Right-click My Computer -> Properties -> Hardware -> Device Manager -> right-click IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers -> Properties -> Primary IDE channel -> Advanced Settings -> Current transfer Mode = “… DMA …”, not “PIO”.

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Ted, the link to What’sInStartup (in post #3) goes to a 404 error page not found msg. So do a lot of the links on the NirSoft front page.

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It works fine now. I suspect their site was down for some reason.

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#29 Must be a glitch in my iteration of Firefox, because it came up instantly in Opera.

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