Slow boot up time.

[Alberts Growbag]

I have friends with a Medion PC similar to mine that complain that after running error check/defrag/disc cleanup on their XP installation their boot up time is now much longer.

It seems to be the initial CMOS time that is longer rather than the actual windows load up. (Long time with black screen before windows starts up)

Have run the excellent Regvac on it without finding any major registry problems. Machine is running an OEM version of XP home, Pent4 1.6, 256SDRAM, 80 Gb HHD. Only 6gb of 40gb boot drive occupied, other partitions even less.

Any idea's ?

[Carpet Rodent]

Hmmm. There are some things you can check from here.

First of all, check your CMOS settings to see what order your Boot Devices are set at. It may be that your system is trying to boot from a CD-ROM, failing, trying the Floppy drive, failing and finally finding the hard drive! It's something I noticed with Win 98 / 2000, as I'd set the 1st boot device as the CD when I was installing. Afterwards, I had to change them back to 1st Boot Device: IDE-0 2nd Boot Device: Floppy

Might be worth a try. Also, if your mate has the same type of PC, try and set your CMOS settings the same as theirs.

[Alberts Growbag]

Thanks, I had suggested they look at that, but will also do it myself next time I look at their machine.

I can't think what the problem might be as this has only happened after a full disk maintenance schedule, and only seems to affect the time that windows starts rather than the time windows takes to boot up. That I could put down to start up programs etc. We have tried booting up without these, as disabled in 'msconfig' but to no effect.

Any further idea's?

Thanks in anticipation.

[What_does_this_button_do?]

In the BIOS it may be set at "AutoDetect" drive type - if you know the drive type you could tellthe BIOS so it doesn't need to query the drive - this might help.

B