Slow Start-Up

Soldato
Joined
27 Jun 2006
Posts
6,453
Hello,

Not sure if this can be resolved or if it is a result of the hardware I have - but I thought I would ask anyway - what harm can it do?

Anyway, I'm running:

Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP2
Intel Dual Core 2 Conroe (E6600 - 2.4Ghz)
Geil 800Mhz Ram (2x1gb)
Gigabyte DS4
ATI Radeon 512mb X1900XT
and the all important hard drive (All SATA) set up:

74GB Raptor (16mb) - This houses the OS and Games, the games being on a seperate partition. The other drive is a 320GB WD (7,200rpm, 16mb) and runs everything else:

--Drive One--
--Partition One-- 24.4GB Capacity -- 7.61GB Used
--Partition Two-- 44.8GB Capacity -- 12.7GB Used

--Drive Two--

--Partition One-- 298GB Capacity -- 7.77GB Used

--

I'm moving onto this rig from a 2x80GB IDE setup, so I understand the computer has a lot more to run than 160GB, but I would honestly be expecting a quicker start up.

The XP bar goes across 21 times and then it loads up. It seems to me that the system only powers up (fully) around at around 15 bars.

I have cleaned the registry and msconfig'ed only what I really need (msn, gmail, zone alarm and avg) - the system is virus and spyware free, so nothing from that end of things.

Is there a way of speeding this up or does that sound about right for my set up?

It's not a big thing at all - but obviously if I can quicken the start up, then it's to my advantage.

Lastly -- and it's more of a graphics card thing I suppose, but only small -- once the 21 bars go across (XP finishes loading), the screen goes odd and shows a whole bunch of different lines, colours, squiggles and so on - and then goes onto the Windows Login Screen.

Is that normal? I ask because I didn't see this before I changed my RAM (GSkill > Geil), the card works fine in games and totally normal the rest of the time, but I was just curious.

Thanks.
 
Is there a way of speeding this up or does that sound about right for my set up?

You definitely have issues. The bar doesn't even go all the way across once on my installation of XP and I have the same Raptor as you!

Quite often a slow startup is related to some kind of network issue, or odd USB conflicts. Are you networking? Also, unplug everything and reboot.

The graphical corruption doesn't have to be your GPU it could be your new RAM. Is your system stable?
 
Ratbag said:
You definitely have issues. The bar doesn't even go all the way across once on my installation of XP and I have the same Raptor as you!

Quite often a slow startup is related to some kind of network issue, or odd USB conflicts. Are you networking? Also, unplug everything and reboot.

The graphical corruption doesn't have to be your GPU it could be your new RAM. Is your system stable?

I thought it was very slow. Cheers for your help.

I'm running a wired connection from my router and a few USB's.

I'll unplug all necessary wires and reboot - and let you know how I get on.

I take it there's no way to fix these odd issues?

The system is stable, yeh. I had GSkill RAM (which is currently being RMA'd) and I replaced it with the Geil RAM as the system was crashing during heavy load (i.e. games) - but it's fine now and hasn't crashed once, touch wood.
 
It all depends on your hardware too. On my AMD 144 Opteron with an Abit nforce4 SLI board and a normal 80GB SATA Maxtor hard drive thats about 5 years old now loaded in less than one bar. All of my intel motherboards ive had load XP very slowly and load in about 9 bars :o
 
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