Slow WinXP startup

[Manvol]

The last few months, my WinXP SP2 startup is becoming increasingly lenghty. I can't say it loads many MBs, only around 210 which is the usual for my PC. But before two months it also loaded 200+ MB but did it much faster. Can someone tell me what's going on?

Is it because of some processes? How can I find which of them are useless and how do I make them not to load in the next startup? Are there programs to help with this?

Note: The PC has 1gig of RAM and is perfectly defragmented (weekly).

 

[CosmoKramer]

Start --> Run --> msconfig

 

[ANova]

Any program can dramatically effect startup time. As Cosmo suggested, try disabling any unnecessary startup programs. Something you installed recently is most likely the case. Either that or a hardware component is failing/acting abnormally.

 

[wireframe]

A major cause of slow booting is a slow or failing DHCP* server on your network. If your computer is on a LAN you should check that the DHCP serving device is functioning or use a static IP.

Also, try booting while making sure you have no discs in the optical drives. Sometimes these will slow down the boot process as they are "mounted".

There are several other possibilities, including a computer virus or other malware (use AdAware and a virus checker).

A failing installation of a program or driver needed at boot may also slow you down.

You should check your logs by right-clicking "My Computer" -> "Manage" -> "Event Event Viewer": here you have three sub-categories with "system" and "application" being the most interesting. Check for red and yellow warning signs.

Did you recently install someting or did something "happen" to your system before the problems arose?

* Short for Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, this is the system that assigns you an IP and other networking configuration information automatically.

 

[Manvol]

Well, as far as I can see there are no useless apps launching upon the startup. It's just the Avast Antivirus Pro, the latest release of Zonealarm Pro and the MSN Messenger.
Maybe one of these causes the slow loading, but I really don't think 210MB can justify such a loading time. Maybe it's a hidden setting or something like that, which causes the PC to pause for some ms before loading the next app or something similar. Still searching....

 

[Rodéric]

Try to google, there is a tool for windows which does diagnose and boost boot up.

It's a MS tool called "bootvis.msi" AFAIR.

 

[digitalwanderer]

Well, as far as I can see there are no useless apps launching upon the startup. It's just the Avast Antivirus Pro, the latest release of Zonealarm Pro and the MSN Messenger.
Maybe one of these causes the slow loading, but I really don't think 210MB can justify such a loading time. Maybe it's a hidden setting or something like that, which causes the PC to pause for some ms before loading the next app or something similar. Still searching....

Kill off the antivirus and Messenger.

 

[digitalwanderer]

Try to google, there is a tool for windows which does diagnose and boost boot up.

It's a MS tool called "bootvis.msi" AFAIR.

Looks kewl, thanks!

 

[Frank]

If your computer is a laptop, it might be that Windows disabled UMD. Known bug.
Check your controllers in the device manager to find out.

 

[Crusher]

As wireframe said, check your event viewer logs. Also look in your Services and see what is set to start automatically. Lastly, make sure the AntiVirus isn't running a full system scan on startup.

 

[suryad]

People still use AVs...firewalls ok...but dunno about AVs. You might wanna check out a software called nLite as well. I boot up with 24 processes which is a lot I know but with OOo quickstarter enabled I only take up 138 mb of RAM at boot. I have set it up so that the Desktop in XP runs on a separate process so that if IE crashes I am not fucked. Even with all that while surfing and having Trillian Pro with a few plugins, google talk, winamp lite, etc etc I dont go over 240 mb of mem usage.