TSGL: Extremely slow booting

[Don Penlington]

Heidi wrote:
>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)>>


Here's my 10-point slow-start guide:

1. Boot to Safe Mode. If still slow, that tells you it's a fairly 
fundamental problem and not normal startups.

2. Ensure that XP firewall is disabled while running Nortons---2 firewalls 
can cause problems.

3. Uninstall Nortons. That's long been known as a bad resource problem 
unless it's well maintained. You'll need to go to the Symantec site and 
download their special removal tool---Nortons can't be fully removed 
without this. Install AVG or Avast + ZoneAlarm, or just use the Windows 
firewall if their requirements are minimal.

4. Disable Fast Indexing Service---this is known to cause slowdowns on some 
systems.

5. Run Msconfig/Startup and untick EVERYTHING.  Msconfig won't allow you to 
disable anything vital to the system so you are quite safe. Reboot and see 
if this makes a difference.  If now OK, you'll know it's one of the 
startups, maybe 2 conflicting ones.  Note however that Msconfig probably 
won't disable Nortons from startup---that's extremely difficult to do 
manually---(by design, to stop any hacking software from doing so). Reboot 
and open Task Manager (Ctrl/Alt/Del) and make sure that only the minimal 
tasks are running.  Startup managers generally won't show you everything, 
so there may still be things running that are unnecessary---eg printer 
files, etc.  If she has Office, disable as much of that as you can from 
startups. It, like a lot of software, seems to think it's vital to the 
system and you can't live without it.  Wrong,wrong,wrong.  If only software 
producers would let US decide what we want opening at startup instead of 
saddling us with all their crummy files which we may never or seldom use, 
life would be a lot simpler.

6. Defrag.

7. See how much free space there is on the C partition---Windows needs at 
least 500 Mb free, depending how much RAM the system has.

8. You could download Bootvis ("Boot Visualizer"), free from Microsoft. 
Read its setup instructions carefully, as there are certain services which 
need to be enabled before it will run.  Bootvis will analyse all the boot 
steps and give you a readout of how long each step takes. Then you can 
easily see where the delays are occurring.  It's quite easy and intuitive 
to use.  Bootvis also has an "optimise boot" button which can sometimes 
help a little, though it won't work miracles if the system is too far gone.

9. Go into Device Manager and disable all peripheral hardware--printers, 
scanners, sound card, TV capture card, etc.  Physically unplug them from 
the computer so that XP can't see them. Internal cards can be left in 
place, as long as they are properly disabled.

10. Scan the system for viruses, rootkits, spyware. Use more than one 
scanner for the latter.  You might  do this as number one step if you 
haven't already done so. However, these are a very unlikely source of slow 
booting without other symptoms showing.

If these all fail to make significant difference, I wouldn't waste any more 
time and would proceed to save everything, reformat C-Drive and reinstall 
XP.  Any boot taking much longer than 60 seconds from cold start to desktop 
first appearing will almost invariably mean sludgy performance.

Of course, if she has regular registry backups (unlikely if she has little 
experience) you would first do a registry restore. this will nearly always 
solve most of these problems, as the causes usually lie in the registry.

The second most likely cause of slow boot is a corrupted driver not loading 
properly. Disabling all hardware drivers and then removing all hardware 
(step 9) should either confirm or eliminate this possibility.

Disconnect from the internet while you are running without protection.  In 
fact, it's a good idea to disconnect before you try any of these 
steps---that's one less item to worry about.

The whole idea when troubleshooting this type of problem is to pare the 
system down to close as bare-bones as possible---then build up from there 
until you isolate the problem.

Don Penlington
 From the Beach at Surfers Paradise in sunny Queensland.
Computer tutorials, local scenery,  and other things at my website:
http://users.tpg.com.au/deepend/index1.html