WinXP taking several mins to start up WIFI and other items

[peterh337]

Hello All,

I have a Lenovo X230 laptop. A very nice machine, 4 core i7. It is running XP due to some apps which need XP and don't run under a VM.

A few months after I got it in 2013, I found that it would not connect to wifi for about 4 mins after startup. Ethernet worked fine but not wifi. Also some other bits don't run until this "magic time point" e.g. most control panel applets won't open, etc.

I have been living with it since but it is annoying.

Can anyone suggest where I could start looking?

I am a hardware/software developer and have built many PCs, so I know a fair bit. The obvious suspicion is a timeout somewhere and I have seen this sort of thing with USB devices when they went faulty.

The HD is an 80GB SSD, there is no AV software, nothing obvious in Startup (and I have disabled all nonessentials there), nothing under the process list in perf monitor (the System process is showing 99% of CPU time all the time there is no wifi so the CPU is not doing something intensive) etc.

I think it is waiting for something to happen and eventually it times out.

I would much appreciate any suggestions.

 

[DeadRam]

DHCP can cause slowness during boot if Windows can't find the DHCP server. Assign a static IP and see if that helps.

 

[kittle]

re-Check your programs that run on startup via msconfig.
if you havent already, get rid of all the 'quick launch' icons apps like to stuff in the system tray

and you can try some of the tools from this stackoverflow post:
http://superuser.com/questions/40205/a-program-to-analyze-startup-times

 

[peterh337]

DeadRAM's suggestion seems to have worked!

I left IP to automatic (DHCP) as default but for DNS I put 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 which are the widely used google ones. There is some evidence that google are throttling the response times on these, but they still work.

Kittle - many thanks for that too. I had already been through that stuff over the last 3 years.