PC Very Slow in POST

fox2319

A bit of an odd one this, I've got a PC with a Q6600 C2D, 4GB RAM and 9800GT grfx - i.e. quite quick. It's 6-12 months old (sadly not too sure)

Over the past few days, I've noticed that it occasionally takes ages to get through its Power On Self Test, to the extent that the other day when I pressed F2 for setup, it took over a minute to show the BIOS screen and was taking 10-15 secs to respond to key presses.

Otherwise, when the PC is up and running it is usually as speedy as ever, it's just this particular issue occasionally when it starts up.

Any ideas?

Wherryman

Have you a Quick Boot option in the BIOS to skip a full memory test?

mr_vampy

I had this problem over a week ago, where it was taking me about 10 minutes to boot into Windows. I finally got it working normal again when I found that there was a problem with a USB cable for my external hard drive and a fault with an old parallel port PCI card in Device Manager. I removed the PCI card and replaced the USB cable and it now starts normal.
Have you installed/uninstalled any software or hardware prior to ths happening?
Hope it helps.

fox2319

Wherryman wrote: »

Have you a Quick Boot option in the BIOS to skip a full memory test?

It shouldn't be doing a full memory test but that shouldn't affect it in the BIOS screen anyway.

Thanks for the suggestion though, I'll double check

fox2319

mr_vampy wrote: »

I had this problem over a week ago, where it was taking me about 10 minutes to boot into Windows. I finally got it working normal again when I found that there was a problem with a USB cable for my external hard drive and a fault with an old parallel port PCI card in Device Manager. I removed the PCI card and replaced the USB cable and it now starts normal.
Have you installed/uninstalled any software or hardware prior to ths happening?
Hope it helps.

Nothing springs to mind. We have an external HDD so I'll have a look at the cable and see if it helps. Still confused as to why it gives such latency on the BIOS menu though, a USB cable etc. would normally slow startup to windows but not BIOS menu.

fox2319

maikie wrote: »

Have you looked at updating your BIOS? See if that changes anything?

Will have a look and see if there's anything there. I'm nervous about doing anything so drastic unless it's a last resort

Strider590

maikie wrote: »

Have you looked at updating your BIOS? See if that changes anything?

Don't do this....... (no offense maikie)

While this can solve compatibility issues and problems with power management, if your PC was fine before and suddenly started misbehaving you should NOT update the bios.
At the most, a bios reset, by removing the battery on the motherboard.

Strider590

This sounds to me like a possible memory failure.

Try removing memory 1 piece at a time (but always leave one of them in place).... You'll soon see if one is causing a problem.