Slow booting up of new PC

Anachem

I'm hoping that the lovely people on the site might provide me with some guidance. I have a pc that is only a couple of months old with XP. I had to unplug it from the mains and when i re plugged it in, it took about 10mins to reboot. i suspect the battery on the mother board might need replacing even though it is fairly new. When booted , everything is fine. How can i test this idea without losing all my settings and is it easy to replace?thanks.

albertross_2

motherboard batteries last years, if it was dead, your clock would be wrong. is everything working ok now?

Anachem

Thanks albertross. When booted, everything fine but when booting from off, it just hangs for about 10mins then windows appears and fine then on. Getting a bit impatient!

meana

it could be something in the BIOS settings where it's trying to access eg CD or Floppy drive first before booting to the hard drive.
When you unplugged it from the mains...had it been shut down, or was windows still running..? if the second you could have corrupted your windows installation

Anachem

It was powered down as normal. is there a way to check in the bios settings if is looking for a disc boot up b4 the hard drive?

Genghis

Have you installed anything recently? Could be a service trying to start/stop..?

Wouldn't do any harm to knock off some of the windows services that are switched on by default, try googling for more info on which ones are safe to switch off.

albertross_2

start, run, eventvwr may give you a clue.


or try a system restore, which can be found under help

johnmc

Is this a stand alone PC or on a Network? How many users on it?

Have "User Profiles" been activated? Get the same problem at work when the account is set to Roaming rather than Local (only mine takes up to 3 hours to load on some of the older machines - that's if it does at all !!).

Try the bios to see if the load order has been changed.

Conor_3

Norton installed on it?

Anachem

Thanks for all of your suggestions. Its a stand alone one user machine. I've run checkdisk in windows and the hard drive seems fine. Its got AVG anti-virus software. Have noticed that once it's booted up, if i power down and then re-start straight away it is fine and quick. If you leave it powered down for a few hours, it doesn't like it. losing it's settings with time?

leomburke

what you haven't said is *where* it seems to 'freeze' - what do you see on the screen when it happens - any words that are there can help -
It wont 'lose' any settings when you turn it off as it has none to lose once it is powered off. Albertross' suggestion of looking in the event viewer is good - what are the last couple of entries in each category ( mainly system i would think ) ( you can just copy and paste ).