Slow booting PC

chabsey

A friend has a new Pc, running XP that takes ages to boot, but in a weird way. It boots to windows really quickly but then sits for ages at the desktop with no indication that anything is happening behind the scenes (ie. no houRglass mouse pointer). Clicking on IE to start browsing the net gives a very quick hourglass then it goes back to the normal point. About 20 seconds later IE opens fine, and from then on everything is fine.

The Pc is new, defragged, spyware free, with all extra crap removed from the 'startup' thing using msconfig and startup cop. It still takes ages to be fully functional.

It's running Norton Internet Security 2005 though, so maybe this has something to do with the delay? But my laptop also runs 2005 and it's not as bad as this PC.

Anyone with any ideas? As I said, all hardware is less than 6 mths old, clean install of XP with only a few programs on it.

Baffling.

aaf

What are his pc specs? How much ram, what cpu is in there? He may need more ram. You could also have a look at his system tray and get rid of anything not needed there especially Quicktime, Winamp, Musicmatch, RealPlayer etc. Also, check his startup folder in programs and get rid of anything not needed there also.

chabsey

aaf wrote:

What are his pc specs? How much ram, what cpu is in there? He may need more ram. You could also have a look at his system tray and get rid of anything not needed there especially Quicktime, Winamp, Musicmatch, RealPlayer etc. Also, check his startup folder in programs and get rid of anything not needed there also.

Thanks for the reply. I've done most of your suggestions though. The Pc is 2.8ghz, and i *think* it may have 256meg (if not it's 512) RAM. Would 256 RAM cause the machine to be so slow at first but then work perfectly? It seems weird cause surely RAM is affected by how many programs are running, so before I run anything it should be running at it's best right?

aaf

Norton may have something to do with it now that I think of it. I don't have it myself, but it may be running a quick virus scan every time you boot into windows. I know AVG Antivirus has the option of a daily scan and if he's only running 256mb, then the pc would be at a crawl until the scan has finished. Have a look around in Norton and see if that's the case. BTW, I may have some DDR ram for sale if he's interested. 2 x 256mb's

stevenmu

256MB should be grand as far as starting XP goes. I'm inclined to think Norton 2005 is the culprit, I don't think I've ever seen a good word about it, and the 2004 Anti Virus pretty much kills my work Windows 2000 machine. Best idea is to disable it fully and see if that helps. You may need to disable some of the services it runs to get it to stop running. It's probably also worth checking the other non-norton/symantec services too and disabling anything he's not likely to need (Server etc).

hefty_langer

stick a shortcut to taskmgr.exe in the startup folder and when it starts on boot have a look at the processes tab and identify what is running on startup hogging CPU...
remove once you are done...

unkel

stevenmu wrote:

256MB should be grand as far as starting XP goes.

Only if very few if any applications are installed. On my PC about 350MB is in use after starting up the PC and before using it