As long as we’re chiming in with weird computer problems…
…. my laptop takes forever to boot. ForEVER. No viruses, no spyware, nothing major like that. My boot-up software is fairly minimal, except it’s possible the avid loader is still doing its thing, I don’t recall.
Anyway, it’s that frickin’ blue screen when XP is doing shit and you can’t see your desktop that you KNOW is already there that drives me crazy. it used to be frickin’ instantaneous.
My question is – how can I figure out what’s taking so long? I was a mad tech genius for 95 and 98 and NT, but hitting ‘escape’ doesn’t throw you to text anymore, and I don’t see anything funky in the bootup slots in the registry.
Any advice?
(specifically not using the geek icon. ’cause today, I don’t deserve it.)
PS Going to Roger Clyne, like right now or as soon as skate gets here, and on friday I’ll be enjoying Cedar Point for the first time in a few years. Just so’s ya know.
Have you tried running msconfig? Sometimes there are programs that don’t show up in startup, are buried in the registry, but show up there.
Guess number two: is it searching for network connections?
I’m a Linux geek though, hence all the guessing.
Mine does more or less the samne damn thing. It’s just gotten incrementally slower at boot over the years. Right now, it takes it’s time with the Windows blue screen, then to the desktop- and then it just… takes forever. There’s no instant happy desktop. In my case, it could be doing what the other person suggested, looking for networks, but damn, if it is, it’s taking a lot of system resources. :(
(Defrag kinda helps. For like, a day. And I think it’s placebo.)
Check out the free utilities on SysInternals. They have utilities to show you what’s autostarting at any point, and you can check/uncheck which ones you want to allow to run. They also have a Task Manager replacement that tells you much, much more about what’s acutally running.
Registry bloat could be a problem, might want to find a cleaner.
Might also want to check your desktop.ini, clean it out if possible.. reduce the number of icons on your desktop?
You can still hit F8 during the boot sequence and do a detailed step by step boot, see if you can spot where the slowdown is.
I don’t know much about XP, either… my focus has been in the *nix arena lately, sorry!
It could also be the very simply problem that it needs a good defragmentation. That’ll speed it up a bit.
defrag, regclean, check to see what is in the run section of your registry. check your event viewer to see if anything is showing up in there any yellow or red entries could be slowing it down. remove things like winzip, office bar or acrobat speedthing from your startup. check to see if you have your virus software set to run a scan at startup.
step by step boot might help show you whats going on too.
I’ll let you know if I think of anything else.
Thanks, I’ll be running a defrag, though I’ve only had it a few months. already checked to see what is loading on boot-up and I’m pretty scrupulous about it. I run AVG antivirus (free), and it’s good about showing me when it is working. Event viewer, eh? To sound stupid, what is that, or specifically where would I find it? Of course, I don’t have any device conflicts. I’ll investigate. :)
If you have the admistritive tools set to be in your start menu it would be under there. You can also right click on my computer/manage to get there. There’s 3 different logs you can look at. System and Application are the ones you should look at. You can also look at the services to see if you have things running that you don’t need to.
Also could check in the registery hklm\software\microsoft\windows\currentversion\run to see what’s in there. I have things in mine it looks like I could clean up.
Could also check your virtual memory usuage.
If none of that makes any difference let me know.
Trick about AVG Free
I learned a painful secret of AVG Free: It causes slowdowns of other programs.
It turns out that AVG scans INI files that are saved. The way that the Widnows INI (profile) facilities work is that every time you make ANY change to an INI file, it writes the entire thing out to disk. Every time that happens, AVG Free butts in and tries to scan the darned thing. The entire system can spend a ton of time just scanning INI files, which can’t get infected in the freaking first place.
Since I don’t use office, I don’t have any need of the “Scan documents” ability of AVG, so I turn that off and it turns off the bad behavior of INI files. If you do need to scan docs, though, the only recourse is to either buy the full copy of AVG or find some other virus program. There’s no way to say, “Scan everything *BUT* INI files.”
I know this because EQ writes to INI files whenever you open/close a window. (It saves the position that the window was in when you close it.) Since you open/close windows a lot in that game (I open bag 1 to put an item into bag 2, etc, or when you cast a spell it brings up a countdown window), I used to have these little spots where I would lag like a sonofa.
This doesn’t help your problem much, but it’s the best advice I can offer other than the classic “reformat/reload.” I hate the idea as much as anyone, but that’s what I finally did to speed back up my own machine. (Of course, it had been about 4 years since I had done the old reformat/reload dance.)
*nods* I haven’t had much difficulty with AVG as of yet, and the computer itself seems to still have its speed, but the thing is, this is a brand new laptop (as of january) with a gig of RAM, and just a few months ago it was spitfire-fast to boot up. now I’m thinking -what- could be slowing it down?
Moonbats
It’s pretty obvious:
You’ve got moonbats clogging your flywheel. They come in through the fan vents and are attracted to the smell of binary data.
Happens every time.
Eat more bran, only thing you can do.
(aka, I have no clue, good luck, I’m worse off than you. I only FAKED my way through working at NTT.)
*L* I’ll keep an eye out for moonbats.db. I know flywheel.dll is a vital component of XP.
Once again, SysInternals has quite a few tiny, marvelous utilites that will do wonders for you. For example:
NTFSDOS v3.02
Access NTFS drives for read-only access from DOS.
PageDefrag v2.3
Defragment your paging files and Registry hives!
Autoruns v8.0
See what programs are configured to startup automatically when your system boots and you login. Autoruns also shows you the full list of Registry and file locations where applications can configure auto-start settings.
Process Explorer v9.12
Find out what files, registry keys and other objects processes have open, which DLLs they have loaded, and more. This uniquely powerful utility will even show you who owns each process.
LoadOrder v1.0
See the order in which devices are loaded on your WinNT/2K system
Autologon v2.1
Bypass password screen during logon
BlueScreen v3.2
This screen saver not only accurately simulates Blue Screens, but simulated reboots as well (complete with CHKDSK), and works on Windows NT 4, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Server 2003 and Windows 9x.
(Install this on a coworker’s PC, and they will curse the day you were born)
I’ve actually downloaded a number of those tools, thanks to your advice, and am working with them now.