New DELL 6400 verrrryyyy sloooow to boot up

nigeloconnor

Hi all,

I just bought a new DELL 6400, from the first time I turned it on it takes upto 10 mins to boot up. I thought this was just going to be for the first time but now it's everytime I turn it on.

So here is my usual evening, I turn on the laptop and 10 mins later I get to the main screen (it take 3mins or more to load applications in the Icon tray - and I don't have that much installed) from here everything I open is sooooo slow to open, so I reboot and everytime it boots up in under a minute and everything opens at normal speed.

I have anti- virus, zone alarm and run adaware every day.

Why is it the first time I turn on the laptop it's takes an age to boot and runs soo slow??? Yet when I reboot everything is normal?

I shutdown the laptop correctly every time....

Confused....

Thanks in advance for your help !!

Ruu_Old

Strange. Windows XP? How much RAM have you got?

nigeloconnor

Yip XP SP 2 installed.. 1 gig RAM.. it's very strange.. when it's booting slowly the processor sounds like its doing nothing.. all thats noising is the fan.. every part of the boot up stage is as slow as the next..

BostonB

Maybe theres a AV scan scheduled? If you've norton installed, uninstall it.

Ghost Train

should not take that long, especially if it's brand new, you should let dell know as soon as possible so they don't blame you for the problem

does booting to safe mode take that long(press f8 before windows starts loading)? if not, maybe it's some software issue

might be worth running the dell diagnostic utility, see if it picks up any hardware problems, could be a hard disk problem or something

nigeloconnor

I don't have Norton installed, AVG I use..

I will try safe booting and let you know.. it's just wierd that it happens the first time I boot up after a period of time..

Thanks for your help

BostonB

Sounds like its running something. I'd check for system scan av sans that kinda thing.

Victor_M

The first thing I did with my new Dell PC a couple of months ago was format and reinstall the hard drive, this got rid of all the crap free software that comes with Dell pc's, my new dual core was taking forever to boot up too, (not 10 mins mind you!) Anyhoo, reinstall a fresh copy of XP (all the required drivers are on the supplied disk) and you wont know yourself, this way you can install only the software you want.

It's a bit of hassle but it is really worth it.

nigeloconnor

Thanks....

I safe booted and all was fine and since then it seems to be booting normally ok.. touch wood.. !!!

Victor, I uninstalled a load of the that **** software that DELL supply too.. but I didn't format the drive..

Hopefully it may have sorted itself out...

juliuspret

Victor_M wrote:

The first thing I did with my new Dell PC a couple of months ago was format and reinstall the hard drive, this got rid of all the crap free software that comes with Dell pc's, my new dual core was taking forever to boot up too, (not 10 mins mind you!) Anyhoo, reinstall a fresh copy of XP (all the required drivers are on the supplied disk) and you wont know yourself, this way you can install only the software you want.

It's a bit of hassle but it is really worth it.

Do as above and you wont regret it.

Dell make a LOT of money by preinstalling all that crap and why should you take it up the ass for them???

Format and reinstall the apps you need from a fresh install!

nigeloconnor

OK i still have this problem where my Laptop boots up slowly from time to time, however i noticed that the fan is always on and it's at its highest level when it boots up slowly. I think whats happening is the fan is on full and CPU is been slowed down. The fan stays on the whole time unnecessary, when i reboot the fa doesn't come on and it boots up perfect.

I read some other articles about this but no one seems to have an answer.

Anyone have similar problems. I am going to talk to Dell about it tomorrow.

TomCo

I had a similar problem, make sure boot priority in the bios is set to check the hard drive first.

cerbeus

I had the exact same problem until I updated to the very latest bios.
Once I'd applied that the problem stopped.
Check the dell support website for the latest bios updates.