Why does my XP take so many 'slides' to boot?

Craig321

Craig321

Craig321

Soldato
Joined
2 May 2004
Posts
19,950
Hi,

Today I was trying to sort out my sister's partner's ATI drivers & some other stuff.

I noticed that it boots in about 5 and a half slides, the only slow-down being is the fact that he has quite a lot on startup. Specs: ATI 9200, Intel P4 3.0GHZ, 1GB 3200 RAM, no special hard drive setup or anything.

My Dad's computer (3.4GHZ, 1.5GB RAM, some ATI graphic card), also no special hard drive setup. It boots in 4 and a half slides... the only slow-down is also the fact he has a lot to run on startup.

Now my PC:

Core 2 Duo E6600
WD 5000AAKS (~15mb/s+ faster than the hard drive in my Dads PC)
2GB GeIL 6400 4-4-4-12
Gigabyte P35-DS4
BFG 8800GTX 768MB

It takes 13 slides, but is quicker to full boot as it is, of course, faster and I have less stuff on startup.

My old PC is also around 13 slides (similar specs to my Dads PC).

My brothers PC is a similar spec to my old PC as well, his also does around 13 slides.

Every build I have done has ended up taking roughly 13 'slides' to boot, it's the same case with my brother.

So, has anyone got any idea why a PC that's less than half the speed of mine takes less 'slides'? :rolleyes:

The only reason I can think of now is the fact that me and my brother have NVIDIA cards. My Dad and sister's partner have ATI cards... would NVIDIA drivers really add ~8 slides to bootup?

EDIT

Also, my PC and my brothers PC have a lot less 'rubbish' installed than my Dads and my sister's partner's PC (my Dads XP build is nearing on 3-4 years now, mine usually don't last 8 months :p). So, in theory, our PCs should boot faster :confused:

Thanks,
Craig.
 
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I take around 8-10 slides too, running a 7600gt.

I'd assume its down to the hard drive speed, as thats where windows is being read from... i may be wrong but thats my educated guess.
 
krisboats said:
I take around 8-10 slides too, running a 7600gt.

I'd assume its down to the hard drive speed, as thats where windows is being read from... i may be wrong but thats my educated guess.
Click to expand...

My hard drive is quite a bit faster than my Dads and sister's partner, my brothers hard drive is a similar speed to theirs.

MikeHunt79 said:
Is your name Jacob Billing? :p ;)
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Yes.... :rolleyes::p

His takes like 19, duh :p
 
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How many USB devices are connected to each machine? I have around 8 devices connected to mine, which almost doubles the time it takes the boot when they are all plugged in.
 
Yeah could be USB devices. Erm have you disabled any ports you don't need in BIOS? Like serial ports etc? That'll reduce your boot time a bit.

Perhaps give Bootvis a run and see what is slowing your PC down. Until you actually know what is going on you can't really fix it as everything we suggest would just be a stab in the dark.
 
This may sound silly but with all my AMD hardware it's took a few slides. With my MSI Neo2 939 board i only just saw the blue bar start before it went onto the next stage. Both my intel setups though have taken 7+ slides and i have the same hard drives, hardware (+devices) except RAM and CPU as i did with the AMD hardware. I dont think it's to do with graphics cards im using nvidia here.
 
Simmy said:
How many USB devices are connected to each machine? I have around 8 devices connected to mine, which almost doubles the time it takes the boot when they are all plugged in.
Click to expand...

My Dad and my sister's partner both have quite a few more USB devices than I do.

MarcLister said:
Yeah could be USB devices. Erm have you disabled any ports you don't need in BIOS? Like serial ports etc? That'll reduce your boot time a bit.

Perhaps give Bootvis a run and see what is slowing your PC down. Until you actually know what is going on you can't really fix it as everything we suggest would just be a stab in the dark.
Click to expand...

I'll check that out, thanks :)

howiepoohs said:
Prob down to drivers or is Norton installed? I found the more updates and the longer the install lasts, the longer it takes to boot.
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Nope. Me, my Dad and my brother have PC-cillin. My sister's partner has AVG

EDIT

OK, I just traced the boot + drivers but I'm not 100% sure on how to read the graph... what are the numbers next to the startup processes?

Thanks,
Craig.
 
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The longest ones to start are the PC-cillin processes (which my Dad has anyway) along with PerfectDisk, Folding, nvidia svc, snagit... the rest are below 1000 (1 second) and none of them are 3000 so it doesn't look like it's any processes slowing the boot down.

Maybe I've got some option wrong in BootVis, but it's only showing my startup processes in the list :(

MarcLister said:
Oh hang on! That the process number!
Click to expand...

Ah, I see, scrap what I said above then :p
 
Hmm are you doing a boot and driver trace?

And this is your startup processes? I'd remove them all using msconfig or something like that. Just have your essential stuff starting up and see how that works.
 
Yup.

It starts to list my startup processes at '31'... before then it's all blank.

All my startup processes are essential, but I'll see what happens with them all disabled :)

EDIT

'Slide' count is the same with all startup items disabled.

Craig.
 
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1HVdIWmM_bootvis.png


I scrolled along a bit so you can see most of the processes.
 
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