System POST: slow boot ups w/ 98se logo

I'm almost happy with my Asus a7n8x dlx. I just want to know if I should expect faster boot up times or should I live with it. At the moment there seems to be a long pause just after the win98se logo screen comes on (about 2.5 - 3mins) then it boots ok.

I read in the Asus Faq that this could be caused by the firewire controller polling for non existent devices. I've tried booting w/out the controller connected, but there appears to be no difference in boot times.

However, another possibility mentioned in the Asus Faq concerns the IDE driver from the UDP nforce v2.00 package - How would I go about checking and then changing the IDE driver (back to the M$ IDE driver of win98se)? Better still where can I get Asus nForce v1.16 driver package (which I undertsand is actually newer than v2.00)?

If the firewire thing is true, then just disconnecting the connectors is not gonna do anything. You must turn it off in the BIOS.

Thanks for the tip naddie. Booting significantly faster now. From POST to desk top now takes about two mins. Asus logo now up for less than 3 secs. 98se logo up for about 45secs (that seems about right).

I would still like to track down those 98se IDE drivers. I've looked in 98se disc but can't identify them under the driver folder. I know they're there. I just don't know what they are called.

But generally speaking I'm very happy w/ rig booting. Finally feal I can start O/C'ing now

If anyone feels that two mins is still too slow let me know. Ideally I'd like to get to desktop from POST in about 60 secs (or am I dreaming?)

EDIT/ actually, I'm now getting boot up times of around 40 seconds after I disabled a load of redundant settings in Integrated Peripherals. It wasn't just the Firewire ports the bios was polling for I guess. There's loads more I could disable, but here are the ones I don't really use:

Disabled on board Nvidia LAN, Firewire, Serial Ports 1 & 2, and Modem Controller. Now she boots like grease light'ning! yihaaa!

XP 1800+ running stock, Soltek SL-75DRV2 - KT266A, 512 DDR, From POST to 98 desktop in just over 40 seconds. I had hit 30 seconds, but on a fresh formatted disk with nothing else - not even vid card drivers.

2000 takes a long time to boot on my machine - about a minute and a half.

However nothing on my board is enabled - except one set of USB ports and one com port. All parallel, serial devices are diabled, all BIOS settings are informed (no 'Auto's)... The board is tweaked to within an inch of its life...

Two minutes is really slow.

Agreed sangram, two minutes was too slow. After disabling all non essenstials she now boots up in under 30 secs (and that's w/ full utilities and pgms) aint life sweet ...