Slow startup following power failure

[elysiane]

I recently discovered my PSU to be faulty when the system spontaneously shut off while running a graphics-intensive application. This happened a few times, but after the latest instant shutoff, the computer now takes a very long time to start up once the XP "welcome" screen appears. The mouse is active during the welcome screen, but I see the welcome screen for about 3 minutes before the desktop loads. About a week before this started happening, I had reformatted the computer, and it had been starting up very quickly (probably less than 30 seconds from pushing the on button to full functionality). Any advice? PSU has not yet been replaced (awaiting shipment from Newegg), but everything outside of graphics-intensive apps seems stable.

I'm running Windows XP sp3
2gb RAM
Radeon HD 2600XT

 

[Outlander_04]

so you are still using a faulty power supply and the computer is slow to boot .

could those things be related do you think?

 

[aford10]

What psu do you have?

I'm thinking the psu doesn't have the nutz to support the video card during the more intense demands of the games.

 

[elysiane]

New PSU (Corsair) arrived and I installed. Crash during intense games problem is resolved, but the bootup problem remains. Any thoughts would be appreciated - I suspect the abrupt crash altered something in the bootup sequence, but I don't know much about this kind of thing.

And Outlander - thanks for the snarky and ultimately useless comment. The faulty psu didn't strike me as the likely source of the bootup problem due to the timing of the issues, and it turned out that the two weren't connected after all. But why bother thinking through something when you can just as easily make a bad attempt to feel intellectually superior, right?

 

[aford10]

Lol....come on now, can't we all get along.

You may want to check the BIOS to see if there is a delay for HD detection.
Is it slow to boot every time?
Is it the same if you boot, and then restart?

 

[average joe]

I would check the logs. It possible something in the software got hosed due to the hard reboots. You may need to reinstall a driver or some piece of software that loads at startup. It could also be a corrupt user profile or corrupt hardware profile. The systems is trying to start something and its hanging for a while. It either gives up or manges to get it running. This is making the start up process slow.

 

[shortstuff_mt]

I'm guessing your hard drive got corrupted with the sudden shut downs. You might have to do another fresh install now that you have your new PSU.