Laptop slow at Windows Startup screen...

motorguy

I have a friend who has a laptop that in every other way works fine but takes anything up to 20 mins on the 'Starting Windows' screen. Its not a particularly new laptop and it has only 512MB of RAM - this cant be upgraded easily its on board RAM, but 512Mb should be fine for windows XP.

I've checked what its doing at startup and removed the stuff that doesnt need to run, also ran AVG and anti spyware software, but i'm seeing nothing that would cause it to be slow at that startup screen. Also normally when theres too much happening at startup it happens once you get to the main screen and i just sits there for a while, so this seems odd its happening at the starting windows screen.

The machine is in another country and i'm looking at it remotely through logmein.com, so i dont have total access to it, nor is my friend very computer literate.

Any thoughts on what i should be checking?

Red_Rose_Exile

It sounds to me that you may have a driver issue. However, there is a lot that XP does at startup, see this page as to what goes on

You might want to have a look at M$KB308041 on Start up troubleshooting

motorguy

Thanks those were both very interesting, but they havent really given me any pointers. According to the process map of whats happening, i'm getting to the step win32k.sys, after which windows moves to graphics mode - there seems to be very little happens after that point?

I also had a look at that troubleshooting doc, but could only find one reference to slow at startup screen, and it was looking at the scenario of at worst it taking a minute to start - this easily takes 15 mins to boot?

There isnt any device driver conflict as its a totally standard laptop with no recently added extras. Also, everything is functioning correctly, and there are no drivers that are in an error state?

Have you or has anyone else any thoughts on what i could be checking??

Red_Rose_Exile

If the driver is corrupted you'd be surprised, just because it is a laptop, it can get corrupted. This IS windows we are talking about

FZwanab

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/personal_tech/article2595059.ece
The above article might be of some use in this instance. Hope it helps.