slow booting problem

[Davyv]

ye basically my pc boots up slow,
goes through all the bios stuff fast,
but then it gets to the windows xp screen with the blue bar scrolling across at a normal speed,
but it just goes on for about 1-2 minutes, then the screen goes black for about 2-3minutes atleast,
and then the pc boots up str8 away and its all ok, with all the fans starting to speed up and more noises starting, but in that say 5-8 ish minutes,
its just like its not doing anything, or if so, very slow

so i was wondering if thers any quick solutions to this, or any screenies u want me takin of ne settings, i have disabled all startup stuff in the msconfig so its nothing application i hope.
i have a athlon 3800+x2, 300gig hard drive which is about half full if that makes any difference, coz i was thinkin its coz my hard drive was full so i deleted loads of films, and no difference.
1gig ram.
ty

and its been like this for months, it mightve been from pretty much when i built the pc, cant remember, just it doesnt bother me much coz i keep my pc on like 24/7, but it would be very nice if i could get it sorted

 

[Ash]

Well, it could be software (mainly things like norton etc...). Although i had this same sort of problem a while back, it turned out that the cause of the problem was my hdd, i went and got a new one, and my pc worked fine again. If you use norton or anything, unistall that, and then see if your pc boots faster.

 

[Davyv]

nope, nothing of the sort on my pc. lol

 

[Xander]

Well then maybe thats your prob if you havnt got any virus/spyware progs on ur pc u may be infected. lol

 

[Senture]

A load up time of that would be caused by a very big ammount of data being processed on start up, if you have a direct internet connection and no firewall or antivirus, then you're suicidle.

 

[Davyv]

i am connected by ethernet to a belkin router, to my 4meg ntl connection.
i have windows firewall on and thats it.

 

[Ragnar]

i am connected by ethernet to a belkin router, to my 4meg ntl connection.
i have windows firewall on and thats it.

Then you should be fine, UNLESS, you like to download all them fancy babes that will dance on your desktop and those ultragigasupermega programs that will install a new processor and 30GB of RAM to your computer.

Any popups or things like that bothering you? If not, try defragmenting, and doing it regularly like once in 2 weeks, otherwise you'll be looking at 40+ hours of defragmenting if you have a big HDD .

Disabling unneccesary devices (stopping the drivers from loading) helps reduce the boot time dramatically, however it requires knowledge of what you should or shouldn't disable.

I once came across a Microsoft program which analyzes and optimizes the boot process by placing the files that are being read at the boot up in order, or something like that however cannot remember the name of that program.