Program to analyse XP bootup?

HelterSkelter

I was having problems earlier this year with XP taking a long time to boot (up to 5 mins). After trying various things without much success I decided to bite the bullet and do a clean reinstall of XP. Everything was fine but in the last 3 weeks or so it has slowed right down again. I've scanned for viruses & spyware but found nothing.

Is there any software that will analyse the various programs/processes that are running during bootup which will help me indentify what is slowing the whole show down?

Thanks.

Karoma

Bootvis...

Saruman

where is it taking the time? The inistial splash screen or after that when its applying network and security settings etc.

HelterSkelter

Saruman wrote:

where is it taking the time? The inistial splash screen or after that when its applying network and security settings etc.

When the desktop screen loads there is disk activity for ages after that.

Ruu_Old

NTBTLOG.TXT should work.

MunsterCycling

When did you last defrag?

smeggle

Why bother - it's one of the crappest 'Tags' I've had the misfortune to lay eyes on - And I've seen some crap ones in my time (and done some )

BOT..
Interesting artocle here on it
http://arstechnica.com/guides/tweaks/sgp-tweaks.ars but for most xp stuff I use this place
http://www.tweakxp.com/

The source of that article from Microsoft Technet
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/guide/sas_fsd_xdvz.mspx?mfr=true

And check this stuff out at tweak xp. You can pretty much lock xp down from there - means less patching and less stuff chattering away on the Internet without your knowledge especially if you don't have a firewall.

(Know the last bit is somewhat unrelated but it's a good resource to have for folk.

HelterSkelter

Thanks smeggle, will check those links out

Saruman

well if its after windows itself has loaded then its obviously something 3rd party thats loading. Virus scan maybe, possibly even some crapware!
download hijackthis from merjin (use google) and you can post a copy of the log.. someone might spot something out of place.

pogonotropher

yeah hijack this is class. can save a lot of time.
back to fundamentals too though- have you disabled all the useless programs from your startup menu?you know when you type msconfig into the run dialog box?

Alun

Another possibility if you're absolutely sure your system is clean, and one that I see a lot of, is that your shell icon cache is too small. This can cause loads of thrashing at startup as Explorer tries to find icons in all the executables in the start menu and on the desktop. It's especially bad if you have loads of software installed (like me ).

I can go into the details if you like, or just Google on "increase size shell icon cache".

EDIT: BTW if you want to check, just download Filemon from http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/Filemon.html and put into your Startup folder. That'll tell you what's causing all the disk activity.