Why is Windows XP taking forever to start?

[thoughtpolice]

Hello!

This is my first time posting here but I have been a long time reader of the forums.

Lately I have been having this problem of Windows XP taking a good 5-15 minutes of starting up. When i get on my desktop it then tends to freeze a lot! If it goes to sleep the screen generally just freezes. Keyboard and mouse still works but everything else is just frozen.

I reformatted my hard drive because of this problem but i still get the same results.

I am beginning to think it's faulty RAM. I have 2 sticks (4gb in total) and i even took one out to test to see if it is just one stick. It seem to worked for a little while but even then i got the same problem. I got annoyed and put both sticks in and to my short luck it worked.... for a little while but same results.

I'm back to 1 stick of RAM and still having the same problem.

My Rig:
Biostar TA790GXE 128M
4GB of RAM
AMD Phenom II x4 955 (black edition)
WD Green 500gb hard drive
512mb Nvidia 9800GT
Ultra LS 600W Power Supply

 

[soundguruman]

most cookies contain spyware.

 

[aford10]

Have you ran combofix yet? It's a real good software.

 

[thoughtpolice]

i ran combofix. the PC started up fine.

I left it on a little bit. It went to sleep. It froze. I restarted. My hard drive won't even boot to Windows now and it sounds like there is a problem with it, making a whole lot of noise. My hard drive is dead i think. It annoys me that i have gone through 2 hard drives in two years.....

 

[soundguruman]

Mmmmm, it's not really the hard drives, I think you have a bunk motherboard.
hook the hard drive to a known good system and test it. I think you will find that it's working. 2 drives in 2 years is not likely or normal. Think Gigabyte.

 

[thoughtpolice]

Your righjt it isnt the hard drive. It started up and windows is booting. The hard drive is making some weird noises though which is why i thought it was the hard drive.

the 2 drives in two years thing, one was a seagate barracuda that bricked from some faulty firmware. that was on a past motherboard.

I bought a new motherboard around March and had no problems until June. How do you know its a bunk motherboard?

 

[thoughtpolice]

Nevermind..... i replaced the SATA cable and changed the power cable to my hard drive and everything worked out fine.

 

[soundguruman]

What's the voltages now?

 

[thoughtpolice]

Nevermind...... everything is back the way it was. This problem is the most annoying. It jumps back and forth from working excellently to freezing every 5 seconds.

heres the new voltages: http://img532.imageshack.us/i/newvoltage.jpg/


By the way safe mode boots faster than normal xp. any reasons for that?

 

[aford10]

The voltages look pretty good.

I think it's time you back up your data, and do a full format and reinstall. I believe you have some sort of profile corruption, windows corruption, or malware.

 

[thoughtpolice]

well that sucks. This happened before. I reformatted and i still got the same problem.

 

[soundguruman]

You may be fighting a bad motherboard, I am starting to suspect that. Can you plug the drive into another computer and test it?
Reminds me of a bad chipset, first it works fine, then suddenly it does not.

 

[tigsounds]

well that sucks. This happened before. I reformatted and i still got the same problem.

Well, I suppose you should check everything.

Have you checked the BIOS settings to be absolutely sure your drive isn't stuck in PIO mode?
Here is what your BIOS settings should look like for IDE hard drives: (you didn't specify IDE or SATA)

You might want to make sure Windows is using DMA and not PIO also,

 

[thoughtpolice]

I have a Sata drive

 

[aford10]

Nevermind..... i replaced the SATA cable and changed the power cable to my hard drive and everything worked out fine.

^^

Have you checked the BIOS settings to be absolutely sure your drive isn't stuck in PIO mode?
Here is what your BIOS settings should look like for IDE hard drives: (you didn't specify IDE or SATA)

 

[thoughtpolice]

everything seems to check out. THe settings seem to be alright, but now so does my PC. It goes from either working really fast to really slow day by day.

 

[aford10]

Any errors being logged in the event viewer?

 

[thoughtpolice]

Wow! Actually yes. tons of errors. Starting from I think when i first reformatted. Tons of errors from the source: lots from cdrom, DCOM, one for setup, one for Dhcp, and loads from atapi, and a few from the service control manager

http://img707.imageshack.us/gal.php?g=eventerrors1.jpg

these pics show the event viewer errors.

 

[aford10]

Wow, I think that's the problem.

You need to go to your motherboard manufacturer's website, and download all of the newest drivers. Then go to your video card manufacturer's website, and download their newest driver.

Update all those drivers, and a lot of those errors should go away. I suspect you'll also need to flash your BIOS.

 

[thoughtpolice]

the bios and drivers that i have are all up to date and i am still getting this slow startup and frequent freezing.

 

[aford10]

Are you still getting the errors in the event viewer?

 

[thoughtpolice]

Well, now i will never know. I got Windows 7 Enterprise on my hard drive thanks to work. When i get home I will install the drivers and see if i continue to have any problems. On my work computer everything is running smoothly. I completely reformatted.
-----

I attempted to run XP on my work computer by putting the hard drive inside, it started up relatively fast but the PC just restarted itself.

 

[aford10]

Sounds good. Thanks for the update.

 

[Jimbo2907]

I have had the slow startup issue with Win XP.....desktop up...curser moving...can get windows Task manager up and shut down via it...but waiting 15 minutes for the system to untangle itself and allow me to use the pc.

I reformatted the drive, and it was fine for a week. Then when it came back...
I removed Comodo anti-virus
I uninstalled all programs except the ones I use daily.

It still took 15 minutes to allow me to work.

Now I have just uninstalled Mozilla Firefox, rebooted and VOILA! NO Delay. I am holding my breath.

Cheers guys

 

[Jimbo2907]

Nope. Next thing that happened was that PC just turned itself off. When I restarted it I got the message "keyboard error or no keyboard present, press F1 to continue" When I stopped laughing....I unplugged the power cable and left for 10 minutes before restarting...now I am back where I started...waiting 15 minutes for the desktop to work properly.

I am going to see if I can update the BIOS. 😗

 

[Caramac]

I have a 2nd hardware profile for offline work - just 24 processes run.
No Alerter, no DNS, no DHCP, etc.

Windows XP load time was a very annoying 2 minutes - normal startup.

No network - TWO SECONDS.

Diagnosing exact reason will take time.