Comments | beardoc: Ridiculous periods to boot up

beardoc

Ridiculous periods to boot up

Aug 15, 2009 20:28

It seems my primary laptop is taking ridiculous amounts of time to boot up. Almost 20 minutes until everything is fully loaded. Interestingly, it seems to take 5 minutes alone to boot through the BIOS (which the original BIOS loadup screen where it says "press F10 to enter setup". Previously it would take about 15 minutes to load everything, but ( Read more... )

Comments 20

danthered August 15 2009, 18:51:42 UTC

I'm thinking it might be a good idea to wipe it fresh and reinstall Windows from scratch

Not to belabour the obvious, but installing Windoze is what got you to this point in the first place.

beardoc August 15 2009, 23:12:56 UTC

I'm not jumping to Linux or Mac - too much of an investment in software for the Windows platform. And believe it or not, I actually like Windows.

fargonrob August 15 2009, 19:32:43 UTC

I have seen this and there are 2 primary causes ( ... )

beardoc August 15 2009, 23:16:07 UTC

I did the defrag and checkdisk already, and it didn't identify anything (I'm running XP Media Centre Edition).

I've already had a bad motherboard on this thing and it was replaced completely last year (2008) so it hopefully won't be a bad board from 2006.

I'm just going to run it into the ground and replace it with a desktop running Windows 7. It will be a reward for getting through these exams!

drewcifernz August 23 2009, 10:37:53 UTC

okay... the obvious here... you HAVE tried a virus/malware check right?

Admittedly slow boot through BIOS (and everythign else) is usually faulty ram, or faulty mobo. The boot sector on the drive is possible, although that shouldn't slow down the BIOS, unless there's a fault with your drive controller. Easiest way to (non-destructively) test this, is to disconnect both drives, and boot from a windows cd.

The microsoft website used to have a ram checking application that you could write onto a floppy disk, and boot from. basically a DOS app that reads and writes to/from memory, and throws different patterns at the ram, to ensure that what's written to ram, is the same as when read back from ram. Depending on the amount of ram, it may take an hour or so, but it's worth checking, as replacement ram should be dirt cheap for a machine of that age.

beardoc August 23 2009, 11:14:06 UTC

Yes, virus/malware software is doing idle background checking and a weekly full system check.

A while ago I got a CD-ROM that booted a version of Linux and then ran some intensive hardware testing. it's how I diagnosed a motherboard problem in the past. I might have to find that again.

I'm still keen to ditch the computer and replace it, though. Only thing that's stopping me is the firewire port on it - I need a portable computer with firewire for recording the podcast!

(The comment has been removed)

Re: Switching to Windows 7 beardoc August 16 2009, 06:53:16 UTC

The solution will be to replace the computer outright - so no reinstalls of anything. I really don't want to do a system reinstall/clean install of Windows 7 over the top.

It's a laptop that has has 3 years of good service - it's done well. It has serious problems now. Time to put it out to pasture, I think.

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Re: So no reinstalls of anything beardoc August 16 2009, 09:32:41 UTC

I'll have to reinstall, but I was going to be buying a new desktop in the not-too-distant future anyway, so it won't require a reinstall on the current computer, followed by an installation on the new desktop. I'll just put up with it for a little bit longer.