Weird Problem

[Lac3y]

When my computer starts up, it loads everything fine. But for about a minute certain things just won't open up. System restore, the little sound icon on the task bar and some other programs just won't respond. Then after a little while (about a minute) they will all open up at once.

I've had a look at my CPU useage, and that never gets remotely high, same with the available RAM.

I've ran a spyware scan, antivirus scan and a registry scan and they're all fine, I've even stopped all the start-up programs but it made no difference.

I'm officially stumped. Can anyone help?

Thanks

 

[Kage]

Hmm. This is a common problem sometimes when the computer has a lot to load up. Even when windows has loaded and the desktop is up, it is still loading some of the programs, like norton, msn, etc.

There is one way of finding out whats slowing the boot up, but I don't know exactly how to use it I'm afraid.

BOOTVIS:

Its made by Microsoft and is called Bootvis. It is designed to tell you what is taking its time.
Maybe someone can help you with that, but a search on Google should find it.

DEFRAG:

Other than that, its not really a problem, but by any chance have you tried a Defragmentation from Start, Programs, Accessories, System Tools, Defrag?

That will clean up your hard drive, placing everything it needs at the start of the hard drive to load up faster. Its best to do that in Safe mode when you can, by pressing F8 I think it is, at bootup, and selecting it.

DISK CLEANUP:

Plus, have you tried running Disk Cleanup, from the same location?
It'll then display a list of things found it can delete.

Make SURE YOU UNCHECK the option to delete Compressed Files (usually starts to happen after 50 days of a program not being accessed on the hard drive)
and then run it, deleting everything the computer doesn't use anymore.

I hope this helps

 

[Lac3y]

Well, I defragged only a couple of days ago, but it doesn't matter now cos I did something silly

I thought it might be corrupted windows files so I stuck my XP disc in and selected upgrade so it would just install a fresh copy of windows and keep all my files (cos I really couldn't be bothered with a full format).

Well, it didn't help my problem and has made everything slow, the internet is running at 512 speeds even though I have 2 meg and stuff is just slower to load.

aaaah crap.

Looks like a nice long format for me tomorrow.

but nevermind, thanks for the help anyway Kage

 

[setishock]

Kage is right here. If you have a lot to load it can be time consuming. If the ram is small and it's loading a lot of dodads it has to load them in then toss them out to the page file to hold on to. Doing a reinstall is just going to burn up one of the restarts you have on the os. 6 at last check. If the problem persists then you should ditch any and all software you are not using. Having it on the system just boggs your baby down. I do a lot of testing so this is a pain for me to do but such is life.
Clean out the reg of unused entries. But if you have not got any reg editing under your belt better leave that alone.
Check what fires up in msconfig. Uncheck what really doesn't need to crank up at boot.
And that little know and misaligned command>>> sfc /scannow
put your xp cd in the drive and invoke this command from the run option in the start menu. Leave the space as you see between the c and the slash. If you don't, it don't work.