Slow boots are plaguing me...

[Terra Knight]

Well, simply put, it takes about two minutes for Windows to boot on my Duron 1000. I don't get it, really, I don't. I've done all that I could in the BIOS to make it run faster and accomplished quite a load of Windows tweeks to get a mere 10 seconds cut, but it's simply too slow.

Now something I haven't tried yet is something I heard about combined some of my startup files for Win, but I've not done any batch work in a while. Any clue what this is all about? If not, any suggestions?

Note: A few buddies of mine think that it's possible that my ethernet card, which is NOT connected to the Net and has drivers, might be causing the lag time.

 

[Fraggle]

Could be the network card(doubt it, read on), but if it is, I'd expect to see a noticable lag (pause?) in the boot, proly right after the shell loaded.

What OS are you running?
and what are the system specs, Duron gig is a good proc, but 32mg of ram or 32mg of free space on the C: drive would definitly hurt boot times.

Something you can try would be to remove all the programs that load in startup. see if that makes the machine boot any faster. I'd be more willing to believe a software conflict (like an antivirus trying to load the same time as ICQ) than any hardware issue
In Win98 or XP you can use MSCONFIG, just uncheck everything on the Startup tab (that's mostly apps that have been installed after winhosed. Definitly safe to unload everything here)

ICQ me if you want.

 

[Focker]

I'm running WinXP Pro, and I had a noticable lag right after windows started, I thought it was my network card.....and by god, it was. I uninstalled the card and drivers, rebooted and the OS found them and reinstalled. Now I have no probs. I think Win was trying to connect to a network, when I only use my card for Broadband. Give it a try it may be your problen too. Just to re-interate, though, my lag was after I booted to windows.

 

[Visidex]

Disable any hardware you don't need. If your NIC isn't connected, disable it.

Stop any services you don't need.

Check the programs you have running at start up. MSConfig is in 98, XP and avaliable for 2000.

If you've used the same install for a while run Ad-Aware and a virus scan on it.

Defrag the boot drive.

 

[Terra Knight]

I pulled out the network card and what do I get? A nice, smooth, 30 second load. That's much, much better compared to the time that I considered equaled to a "freeze". I've also ran a defrag of my 40Gig (7200) disk which had little to effect.

With a few slight modifications to msconfig, and yes I've used this before this day, I'm now pulling a neat 22 seconds, which is fine by me, even excelent.

For fraggle, it's 256DDR, Duron 1000 (10x100Fsb), 40Gb 7200rpm. Thank you all for the most prompt (Get it? MS? Forgive the pun...) response. (Yes, I'm a geek and I love it.)