TSGL: Booting

[Don Penlington]

Jonpan wrote:
>Any ideas how best to get to the bottom of this?>>


Try Microsoft's free Bootvis (Boot Visualizer).

It will give you a chart indicating where boot delays are occurring. It 
also has a "boot optimizer" button which sometimes helps.

You could try removing and uninstalling all peripherals and their 
drivers---printers, scanners, etc. More often than not, boot delays are due 
to faulty drivers trying to load. If that fixes it, you'll know where to 
start looking. More than likely, it won't be just one rogue driver or 
whatever causing the problem. It's often a conflict between 2 perfectly 
good components trying to load together. Remember also that most a-v 
programs load with XP at a fairly low level---see if uninstalling the a-v 
helps.

When you say boot time, I'm assuming that's the time from power on to 
desktop first appearing---ie before startups kick in. XP should load in 
30-40 seconds. After that, startups can be very unpredictable. I found on 
mine that uninstalling zone Alarm Pro and AVG---both good programs in their 
own right--- cut startups time by over 30 seconds. But that, of course, is 
not part of the real boot time, if that's what you mean.

The fact that it's intermittent makes it hard to trace, and rather points 
to a hardware problem. Try re-seating memory chips and display card and 
check all fans.

Don Penlington


 From the Beach at Surfers Paradise in sunny Queensland.
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