PC Boots slowly

Sillychuckie

My home PC boots up mega slowly... takes approx 15-20 minutes. My mum is moaning that she can turn it on, have a bath, and it is only just loading windows when her hair gets dry.

Anyway, the huge delay is before windows actually starts so it isn't just a load of junk in her 'startup' dir, or registry (and I have checked these common places anyway, as well as msconfig etc).
The delay is mostly when the "Windows XP" logo shows on boot, with the little blue line below it moving from left to right.
I am certain this is just microsoft beautifying its startup process and behind the scenes, it is doing some text processing.

My question is this:
Do you know of any way to hide the windows logo bootup screen and restore it to how windows 95/98 used to be? With those, you would see stuff scrolling past as it loaded the cd drivers etc, did any virus scans.
I am convinced that if I can see what it is actually doing behind the scenes during that 10 mins, I'll be able to stop it happening.

A full format usually solves the problem temporarily, but it is not too long before it grinds to a halt again (so id rather try it this way and get to the root of it).
The PC is old (666mhz, 512mb of slow RAM with mobo timing conflicts)... but it should still be able to boot into xp faster than this.
My old 133mhz machine outpaces it by miles, and it only has half the ram.

Cheers very much, all thoughts welcome, except the 'buy a new computer' one.

Quincy_3

So are you saying its an upgrade, and a Genuine one at that?

In the Bios you can disable show splash screen.

Sillychuckie

What doy ou mean, is it an upgrade? They are both old PC's, obviously.

In this particular BIOS version, you can not. I have looked through it with a fine tooth comb.

I am not entirely stuck in the past. I have 2x 1.6ghz machines too.

Quincy_3

Thats Odd not to be able to turn off the splash screen.

Upgrade means from Win98 to XP because you mentioned this.

Sillychuckie wrote:

My question is this:
Do you know of any way to hide the windows logo bootup screen and restore it to how windows 95/98 used to be?

albertross_2

This is more comprehensive than msconfig

http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/Autoruns.html

Is it fully patched with https://www.windowsupdate.com, uptodate AV software and antispyware etc?

Checked for rootkits?

http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/RootkitRevealer.html

http://www.f-secure.com/blacklight/rootkit.shtml

Quincy_3

Disable the Windows XP Splash Screen

Ever wonder what's going on behind that splash screen? Well, now you can find out!

Right click My Computer, Properties, Advanced, Startup and Recovery, Edit. Edit BOOT.INI. Add "/SOS" right after "/fastdetect" with a space between. The line will look something like this:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /SOS. When you're finished. The first part, multi(0)..... may not be the same on your machine. Upon restarting, the splash screen will be gone. It can be re-enabled by removing the new switch

Sillychuckie

Yes, it is up to date with windows updates... and has AVG installed which is completely up to date.
I was hoping to just get rid of that loading windows screen, not load on more software that will probably slow it down more...
BUT, ill check them out anyway. Can't do much harm.

Thanks.

albertross_2

they are one off scanners that don't run at startup.

also check the event log (start, run, eventvwr)

and https://www.ccleaner.com if you haven't got it.


http://greatis.com/utilities/bootlogxp/

Sillychuckie

Thanks Quincy, thats what I was looking for.
After disabling the splash, I can now see that each time it bootsup it is performing a full check of the hard disc drives... Some form of scandisk.
Now all I have to do is figure out how to disable that.
It really shouldn't be doing it each and every boot up... Any ideas how I might stop it?

Chippy_Minton

See Chkdsk.exe or Autochk.exe starts when you try to shut down or restart your computer.

IvanOpinion

SillyChuckie, it sounds as if the computer is not being shutdown properly .. you shouldn't just turn a windows PC off it should be shut down properly using 'start'->'shutdown' menu option. If your computer refuses to shut down properly then check the Microsoft site there are some patches to fix this problem ... also check your 'temp' directory it is likely to contain a lot of garbage.

If it works properly for a while after formatting then it is possible you have a bad sector on your hard disk ... try running a full diagnostic program on it might help.

Ivan.