boot lag

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Pulsidaration

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I have WinXP pro on a AMD Athlon 1.2 Ghz with 512 Megs of RAM and a 60 Gig HD NTFS format.
My computer used to boot in 30 secs. But one day, it decided to boot in 1 min or so; it's been like that since then. I decided to reformat my HD and reinstalled the OS, worked fine for 2 weeks and then again it decided to load slowly, I didn't install any new software on it.
I tried to use bootvis, but it's not helping. Anybody got an idea why it would decide to slow the boot down by itself?
Thanx for the help guys.
 
What do you use for a defragmenter?

How fast are the HD's?
 
My HD is 7200 rpm. I use Norton SpeedDisk and MS Defrag.
 
Originally posted by Pulsidaration
My HD is 7200 rpm. I use Norton SpeedDisk and MS Defrag.

I would say thats a good place to start. Do you use both at different times, or one exclusively? If your using Speed Disk, this program messes with the boot and app optimizations XP routinely performs every three days to speed up boot time and app starts. Both have their own way of doing things, and both undo the others work. AlecStaar and I working on a patch to make SD ignore these optimizations, thus both SD and XP will be nicer to eachother.
Now, if your using both SD and MS Defragmenter, thats a major no-no. Both work under different algorithms, and thus undo eachothers work in a real big way. This could be whats causing your decreased boot times to increase. If I were you, I'd use the MS defragger until our patch comes out, which should be soon.

Maybe AlecStaar will pipe in here, and add more additional information for you, and maybe a differing opinion. But I'm almost certain this is what is causing your problems.

Post back if you need more info, or have other questions...
 
Actually I haven't used SpeedDisk or MS Defrag yet. These are the sofwares I have. I know that there are a lot of idle times in the boot. I noticed that with the Bootvis diagrams and the led on my HD. I dont know why there are that many idle times.
 
uh oh speed's posted more than twice....he's hijackin! LOL :D
 
Originally posted by ZipTriX
uh oh speed's posted more than twice....he's hijackin! LOL :D

Naw, I'm just doing my civic duties, making small problems become bigger...:D


Seriously,

Pulsidaration, How long has it been since you installed XP? If I were you, and you say you havent defragged (I'm assuming this is what you meant), I would do so right now.

Bootvis and the XP optimizations depend on a defragmented drive to work better. From what MS says, if your HD is majorly fragmented, the optimizations arent going to amount to much.

BTW, what apps do you have starting at logon?


Thanks.
 
I've reinstalled XP like a month ago. Since I've installed only 4 programs. So I could watch what could have caused that slow down, It just appeared out of nowhere.

I got adobe gamma loader, Norton antivirus loading at logon.
I dont have any crap like MS Messenger, yahoo, ICQ or god knows what.
 
Do you get any errors in the Event Viewer concerning disk errors, or anything you think might be relevant?

Are you using any kind of PCI IDE/SCSI Controller?
 
How do I check the Event viewer? I'm not using any PCI controller.
 
Go to Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Event Viewer > Click the System Column.

Any red or yellow flags that you think might be relevant, post them here. I need to see if something is gumming up the works.
 
I'm gonna have to get back to you on that one. I'm using a computer at work right now. But thanks for the tip. I'll post the result on this thread and send you a private message.

Thank you again.
 
No problem.

I might not be around til around evening tomorrow, but You can maybe send AlecStaar a PM if you cant get a hold of me. He's pretty good at figuring this stuff out too...

Good Luck...
 
I think I found the error, that may be revelant to my problem.

Here's what I saw in the Event viewer under System.

Everytime I start the computer I get this "Warning" in the source "Disk":
"The driver disabled the write cache on device \Device\Harddisk2\DR4."

Could it be bad IDE drivers?
 
Hmmm....

Go to Control Panel > System > Hardware > Devince Manager > Disk Drives >(your disk) > Policies Tab > "Optimize For Performance". Then reboot a few times, see if the setting sticks.

Get back to me, see if that does it.
 
I've just noticed something while running bootvis for a second time: it's telling me that Cache writing is DISABLED, but I checked my disk policies, and it is enabled.
I have no idea about what's going here!!!
Do you guys have any insight???
Oh btw, I've just defragged my HD, and Windows wouln't boot anymore. I had to to do repair install, to get it back....
 
Originally posted by Pulsidaration
I've just noticed something while running bootvis for a second time: it's telling me that Cache writing is DISABLED, but I checked my disk policies, and it is enabled.
I have no idea about what's going here!!!
Do you guys have any insight???
Oh btw, I've just defragged my HD, and Windows wouln't boot anymore. I had to to do repair install, to get it back....

My first hunches is that:

1) You had something majorly wrong with your install,

2) Something was corrupted on the partition, (Do a Chkdsk, just to make sure)

3) Your HD may be going bad.

Also, check in your bios. Some Bios may have a setting to disable the 1st and secondary cache. Make sure these are enabled.

If I think of anything off the bat, I'll post back. Let me think on this for a bit...
 

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