Windows XP taking a long time to load

[dpearson]

Windows XP is taking a very long time to load (around 10-15 minutes). I just reformatted a couple weeks ago because it wouldn't get past the "Windows did not start successfully" prompt where it asks you if you want to load safe mode.

But anyway, it's been reformatted and I reinstalled every essential I can think of -- chipset drivers, video card drivers, and Service Pack 3. I also just upgraded my hardware today (completely unrelated to this, the slowdown isn't THAT bad to justify getting new hardware) and it's marginally faster by a couple of minutes, but still unacceptably slow.

The hardware I was running before the upgrade was:

DFI Lanparty Ultra D
Athlon 64 3500+
OCZ Gold 1GB DDR 400
Radeon X1650
Samsung Spinpoint 250GB

New hardware:

Gigabyte P35-DSLR
Core 2 Duo E5200
Kingston HyperX 2GB DDR2 1066
Radeon HD 4850
Samsung Spinpoint 250GB (same drive)

Also, I don't know if this helps, but the part that's really slow is the dashed white bars at the bottom before it gets to the Windows XP logo.

 

[corkyg]

Originally posted by: dpearson
Also, I don't know if this helps, but the part that's really slow is the dashed white bars at the bottom before it gets to the Windows XP logo.

That's odd. I am running XP Pro w/SP3, and have never seen any dashed white bars. Sounds like something is loading BEFORE XP. You doing RAID or anything? AV? Firewall?

Added: Did you upgrade your hardware AFTER you did the XP reinstall? If so, that could be the problem - instead of the normal BSOD that would occur with a different mobo, you may be getting a slowdown.

 

[Maxspeed996]

with the new hardware, I would expect a increase in performance , and loading times. Including boot times. No matter what , you have the 10-15 seconds to wait for the hardware to run a check when you click the power button, but after that, well I would direct my attention the the only piece of the puzzle that is the same....the hard drive.

 

[dpearson]

Originally posted by: corkyg
That's odd. I am running XP Pro w/SP3, and have never seen any dashed white bars. Sounds like something is loading BEFORE XP. You doing RAID or anything? AV? Firewall?

Added: Did you upgrade your hardware AFTER you did the XP reinstall? If so, that could be the problem - instead of the normal BSOD that would occur with a different mobo, you may be getting a slowdown.

I'm not running RAID or anything like that...just a single hard drive. I'm pretty sure it's before XP loads. Once XP loads it's very fast.

I was getting the slowdown with the old DFI motherboard too. It's only a little faster with this new hardware. Are there any benchmarks I could run that would give you more helpful information?

I would direct my attention the the only piece of the puzzle that is the same....the hard drive.

I bought the hard drive from newegg a little over 3 years ago. Could it be going out on me?

Added: Also I'm probably going to have to reformat again due to my XP Pro license being used too many times. We'll see if there's still a slowdown after that.

 

[Xordae]

When my old XP took 5-10 minutes to load up instead of 15 seconds, it was because of the second SATA harddrive. I could hear a repeating sound as if something was spinning up and then going back to 0 repeatedly, that was the HD.

 

[Engineer]

Not saying that this is your problem, but I had a PC recently start doing that (30 minutes to boot at times), and strangely enough, it was the SATA cable. Changed the cable out and boom....back to normal.

Once you get it to a normal booting speed, use BootVis to speed the booting of XP up (sometimes substantially).