TSGL: Extremely slow booting

[Tilman Brandl]

Heidi,

maybe others have mentioned these already, I'll anyway the hints that come to my mind .....

Taking several minutes for starting the machine indicates something more severe, I guess.

Spyware or other malware lurking & working in the background. 
1. As already mentioned look at the startup list (other than startup inspector: run msconfig from 'Start | Run ...' and check the Autostart section. Startup Inspector of course is more comprehensive.

2. Another option is HijackThis - easy to use although installing it from a .zip might be a problem. She could copy and send the logfile easily, chances of finding the problem would increase considerably. http://www.merijn.org/files/hijackthis.zip 

3. Could there be a problem with a networkconnection that can't be found? Doesn't sound like there's a LAN or something, but one never knows. And also: Searching for a network connection wouldn't take 10 minutes I think.

4. Other promising options might be starting the PC in Safe mode + enabling boot logging and afterwards looking at the Ntbtlog.txt file

Tilman

-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- 
  Von: Heidi Schröder 
  An: TSGL 
  Gesendet: Donnerstag, 14. Dezember 2006 17:58
  Betreff: TSGL: Extremely slow booting


  Hi everybody,



  once again I am trying to solve a problem for my friend - she does know 
  absolutely nothing about the technical side of a computer. Her husband 
  obviously is not much better but is willing to follow how to work out things 
  when it is written down clearly.



  Now by chance I came to know that their computer does take roughly 10 
  minutes to boot up after being completely switched off and about 5 minutes 
  even to wake up from Standby mode (seems that has been this way always or 
  for a long time already at least). It is Windows XP for sure, home edition 
  is my guess and I hope they are doing all updates as well. I know for sure 
  they are using Internet Explorer (probably still 6, as my friend did not 
  mention any problems with a new view of Internet Explorer) and they are 
  using some Norton Pack with firewall and antivirus software. Lately the 
  computer became very slow in general so I have told them to do a general 
  clean-up which obviously did work as by now my friend can write her mails 
  without the terrible delay she had then. But I have really no idea what 
  programme to advise them for to check the start-up folder which was my first 
  guess for the long delay. I mean, all such programmes I came to know so far, 
  usually are not really good for you when you do not know quite a bit about 
  the programmes you have installed and all that.



  As I can't imagine there can be that much in the start-up folder to slow the 
  computer down that badly - are there any other problems that can slow the 
  computer down at booting that much?



  I know it is the usual difficult bit and I ask for a lot of guessing, but 
  please do it - I will not get more information from my friend as she does 
  not want to get into the computer stuff more than absolutely necessary  and 
  her husband will not talk to me, the person who does know all computer 
  things better usually.



  Have a nice day

  Heidi