Start up question

[Vicviper]

OK. On start up my PC takes atleast 5 minutes to boot up. I have no idea why and that is why I am asking you people if you have any ideas where or what I should do to get the boot up process faster.

My PC is running Windows 2000. I have a 1.2 Ghz athlon processor and an 80GB hard drive which has 75GB available space.

I need help pleae!!

[Kid0_oIcarus]

Whoa. 5 minutes!?

At which part does it take the longest? When 2000 is booting up or right after the POST screen?

I can help you, but it'd take some time as I don't use Win 2k.. so someone feel free to jump in while I look into this...

[vherub]

do you have any programs that quickstart up (realplayer, aol, winamp, etc)
or have you installed any programs and then uninstalled them
computers just start slowing down as they get older, when my computer was new it was lightning fast on the start, not its lightning fast to crap out

[Vicviper]

Originally posted by Kid0_oIcarus
Whoa. 5 minutes!?

At which part does it take the longest? When 2000 is booting up or right after the POST screen?

precisely! When 2000 is loading. It says windows is loading preferences and it seems to sit on that screen for the longest time.

Vherub. I do have programs that quickstart.

[Rubeus]

This is an indication that one or more of your PC cards are about to fail. Check your sound card, network card, SCSI or even graphics card. I had the same problem in the past, it turns out that my network card is starting to fail, after I removed it from my machine, my computer boots up fine again.

Alternatively, try to optimize your hard drives, use Speedisk or something, this may speed up the loading as well.

[Vicviper]

Cool. Thanks for the advice.

Can I run some sort of diagnostics test on each of my cards? Does windows 2000 have that capability?

[Alucard]

There could be a few reasons. 1, you got a zillion porn pics on your system which greatly slow it down. Or perhaps you haven't defragged your drive in an age. Defrag it and you'll see a performance increase. If you can't fix it then I recommend a reformat of your drive and reinstall windows. This has to be done every couple years or so to get your system totally happy again.

[Kid0_oIcarus]

It's ridiculous that the way Windows' registry works, one truly DOES have to reformat to get some kinks ironed out...

I hate Windows... but sadly there's nothing else viable out there for the gamers...

[vherub]

the win2000 diagnostic tests are the equivalent to sugar pills, try norton for a slighter better placebo

from personal experience, the performance gains from having programs quick start up ends up taking longer than just starting them after the computer boots up (the only thing i have startup is mozilla) so try cutting those out of your diet before messing with the potentially larger headache of formatting re-arranging the registry


slightly off topic, but when you mess around with your computer and it turns into a deeper and deeper sh^tstorm, thats when life would do well to imitate games and have a savepoint you can reload to go back to before you created the mess

sigh....

[Rubeus]

It is also a good idea to run AD-AWARE to get rid of all those spyware and ad wares in your system, they do take up a big chunk of memory.

I used to have this stupid popups in IE that cannot be blocked, it turns out the popups came from the Gator adware when you install the free version of DIVX.

[Vicviper]

Does Ad-Aware have a free download?

I'll turn off all my auto-load programs that are not needed. Hopefully that will do the trick.

[vherub]

yeah, adaware (www.download.com) is free and great for not just gator but all kinds of web garbage that leeches on

[admin]

If you want to avoid websites installing garbages in your system. In Internet Explorer options, turn OFF the following options:

- Install on Demand (Other)
- Enabled 3rd Party Browser Extension.

[suronosuke]

maybe you have managed to aquire the lovely win32.pifi virus ):
that krap makes your computer slow and then ...muhu wahahha hahaa

[grahf]

You might want to disable virtual memory. Usually if you have more than 512mb of ram, there's no need for this option. I found that disabling VM actually sped up my computer, both in performance and startup, as well as noticeably less harddrive access activity. Two birds in one stone..