Slow startup on Dell laptop

pomorain

Hi,
I use a Dell Inspiron 8500 laptop which works fine except for a problem which developed a couple of months ago: When I'm booting it up I get the normal Dell flash on the screen but the screen then goes dead for two to three minutes before the box asking for my password comes up. I have the Zone Alarm firewall and AVG anti-virus programmes running but I don't think they're the cause as I never had trouble with them initially. The only big thing I did around the time the problem started was to install the Windows XP Service Pack II. Could that have anything to do with it? Will anything terrible happen if I uninstall it to find out?
Cheers,
Padraig

Cal

Try Bootvis

Cal

pomorain

Thanks. I ran bookvis. Don't really know enough to know what I'm looking at. Over one of the tables it says "Warning" Disk cache writing is disabled". Could that the problem and how would I fix it?

lomb

reload xp and go from there.

Cal

If you can't make use of the information returned by bootvis then just click Trace - Optimize System. That should do the basics for you. If that fails a more dramatic clean install should work.

Cal.