Wireless Network Icon Very Slow to Load in System Tray in Windows XP

[pouli100]

Computer Specs:
Dell XPS M1210
Intel Core2 @ 2 Ghz
4 GB of RAM
Nvidia GeForce Go 7400
80 GB Intel SSD MLC

I'm having a sudden issue with the load time of the wireless network system tray icon in a fresh install of windows XP on an INTEL SSD. I mention the SSD part only because it's the last source of the problem my limited computer knowledge can think of as I have tried everything else. With the SSD, Windows loads EXTREMELY FAST. My antivirus, sound icon, bluetooth, and one or two other startup programs load instantaneously. At first, the dell and windows wireless programs loaded instantly as well but this suddenly stopped and despite several restores to earlier settings where I hadn't installed some of the other programs I need, I haven't been able to identify the triggering event. Now, once the first few programs have loaded, the computer literally hangs for a minute before loading the wireless components. Once this is up, there are no more problems and everything is blazzing fast. There are no other "hangs" at any other time. During the hang, the system idle indicates full cpu usage and no other process seems to take place. I have gone completely barebones, disabling every startup component using the services menu in admin tools and a config function someone suggested I use. I can't even blame the antivirus. Even when removing the drivers for the wireless card, it still takes the same time for windows to tell me it needs drivers and identify the new hardware. Others have encountered the same exact problem but have had no apparent success in fixing it. One guy said that he thinks but is not certain that he fixed it by disabling his intel graphics startup program and downgrading from IE 8 to 7. I have an Nvidia card and run IE7. I would love if someone could shed some light as to why this issue has suddenly arisen. I use to run Vista on this machine before I upgraded the hard drive to an SSD and although Vista was painfully slow, the wireless programs loaded up normally and there was no hanging. If there is anymore information I need to provide, please let me know how to obtain it. I would very much appreciate the help.

 

[Guest]

Hi,
I also came across a very similar problem a few days ago. I went through much the same procedures as you without any success. It was driving me crazy and as an IT engineer I felt somewhat frustrated at my inability to find the cause....However the good news is I have finally got things back to normal and no not by reformatting the whole machine!! I discovered that the problem was that certain services were initializing and holding up the rest of the boot up process. In my case they were completely useless, unneeded and pointless printer services from HP. I would suggest you have a look at your services and see which ones are started and if any can be safely disabled, and then try a reboot. if you're unsure just let me know and I'll try and help. A good program for seeing exactly what your computer is running in the background and particularly at startup is Autoruns from sysinternals. It lists almost everything - useful when the startup items listed in msconfig are just the tip of the iceberg. Hope this helps...

 

[pouli100]

Thanks Robin_38, I will definitely try that. For now, I did a restore back to when the problem wasn't affecting me. It seems the restore brought me back to just before I installed my blackberry software. I haven't reinstalled it since out of fear I will again have the issue but I'll have resign myself to it eventually. Thanks for the tip about Autoruns. I will install it prior to reinstalling the bb software.

 

[bretton_s]

Thanks Robin_38, I will definitely try that. For now, I did a restore back to when the problem wasn't affecting me. It seems the restore brought me back to just before I installed my blackberry software. I haven't reinstalled it since out of fear I will again have the issue but I'll have resign myself to it eventually. Thanks for the tip about Autoruns. I will install it prior to reinstalling the bb software.

Re: NIC slow to load in Windows XP

Just an update. I followed pouli100's instructions for fixing this problem and it worked! What I did was open services.msc and sorted the list of services by status. I found that "HP CUE DeviceDiscovery Service" was holding up the show. I then changed it to Disabled and rebooted. Problem fixed. Thanks pouli100 for your info. Thought I would do the same.

 

[lamamilan63]

Hi,
I got some problem in my windows 7(TOSHIBA). My network icon load too slowly, it takes while to load but other icons load fastly. So i need help, please help me..... I don't know what to do.

 

[bertrem]

FWIW, I had this same problem with an almost brand new installation of WinXP SP3. After extremely tedious trial-and-error/binary search through the services, I finally found the culprit to be the MS .NET service associated with .NET version 4. This service was delaying the load of the wireless services by almost a minute and a half. Go Microsoft. Thanks so much for that. Needless to say the entire piece of junk has been uninstalled.

In the process I also identified two other services that cause lag, albeit not as much: both the Workstation and Server services collectively add about 20 seconds to load time, but I haven't figured out any way to improve this, as both are necessary.

 

[Laurence Roels]

Hi, I had a similar problem and I resolved it after I found out that under "Services" the "Network connections" was set to "manual", after changing it to "Automatic", my machine boots much faster without a long wait before being able to surf.