PC practically freezes up at startup

Milarky

This first happened Sunday (just after the clocks reset) My DELL pc just became incredibly slow when I first switched it on. I tried rebooting about three times and - suspecting the timeshift - reset my date/time to seven days earlier. Running McAfee after doing this on the third restart I noted how the program was finally running at a normal speed again. Thus it seemed to clear itself up. (No virus found)

This evening (after use earlier in the day) the same problem occurred. I repeatedly rebooted to no effect. I did a system restore to no effect but the problem finally appeared to sort itself just by running the PC for long enough from start up (about 15-20 mins) while I watched a film on the media player (which it did have just enough 'juice' to run!)

Also several times the 'blue screen' of the CHKDSK program appeared notifying me of checks for 'disk consistency' and it appeared to find (and fix) several such problems before starting WinXP

Any ideas - or is the disc just getting 'scratched' in some way from 'old age' and once 'warmed up' it finds whatever it's looking for allowing things to run normally again?

Thanks

I'mcomingbackasaman

I'd get rid of Mcafee and choose another anti-virus/firewall provider when I used it, it blocked a lot of the sites I wanted to view slowing the system up.

BoingBoing_2

I have a 1 year free McAfee disk and only had it installed for half an hour before removing it! My pc ran so slow that I decided to revert to a free anti-virus/firewall prog from download.com, which are an excellent source of free software

Milarky

We're talking above the PC nearly stopping in "m-i--d s--e---n--- --- t. . .. .." that sort of thing. I am more suspect of age and use than any particular software. But yesterday I reset the date to current date and switched off. When I tried to start the PC this am the same (or worse) was happening and it only seen fire up after I finally adjusted the date/time before Sunday's date as I did before. (Coincidence?)

robnye

try removing mcafee and see if the problem exists after correcting the date and time, if it does, then as mentioned install a different antivirus/firewall....

unfortunately, it is a case of trial and error

BillScarab

Whatever is causing it, if you can get it running normally for a while I would advise backing up all of your data. If you are getting disk errors it could indicate that your hard drive is on the way out.

If it has started happening suddenly I wouldn't expect it to be McAfee if it has been running fine with it installed before.

How old is your PC and have you installed anything new recently?

culpepper

you could try pressing cntrl-alt-delete and looking to see which program is taking all the memory in the processes section of windows task manager . If macafee has a very large number beside it,try right clicking it and choose end process tree.It may not let you but if it does,it will close macafee and you can see if it suddenly continues to finish its startup routine normally.