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XP pro seems to take an age to boot up
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Posted September 5, 2012 at 7:03PM
the other night i inadvertantly switched machine off while shutting down, the nex night it would not boot past desktop whih i resolved with system restore, but since then it seems to take much longer to boot,
any ideas or have i done some damage? XP pro sp3
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Posted September 7, 2012 at 4:38PM
It's a bit of a long-shot Johnny but has one of your memory modules suddenly failed? You can check the amount of memory Windows can see and use via Control Panel -> System.-> "General" section.
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Posted September 7, 2012 at 5:23PM
Try booting up in safe mode. If it boots up in the usual time it did before, then you have a corrupted program. Could be Windows update or a Security program.
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Posted September 7, 2012 at 7:13PM
Secret-Squirrel.
not having much luck with your suggestion unless i am a bit thick?
rdave13
will try your idea later tonight, thanks for the interest
johnny
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Posted September 7, 2012 at 10:22PM
Try a right click on my computer choose manage then device manager in the IDE /ATA/ATAPI controlers section double click on the Primary IDE Channel then the Advanced Settings Tab the Transfer Mode should be DMA if available , if it is showing a PIO mode then that is most likely the problem , the fix is to change the settings to PIO only ok out reboot then open up device manager in this same area but this time right click on "IDE /ATA/ATAPI controlers" at the top of the list and choose Scan for hardware changes , with a bit of luck this will get your drive back into a DMA mode , the reason this happens is that after a certain number of DMA transfer errors windows incrementally downgrades the drive DMA mode until it eventually ends up in PIO mode
Cheers HC
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Posted September 8, 2012 at 8:51AM
"not having much luck with your suggestion..."
Sorry if I didn't explain things properly.
Your PC will have two or more memory modules installed. If one of them has failed then your PC will boot a lot slower and its performance will be adversely affected too.
If you know how much memory your PC's supposed to have then check what XP is reporting as per my previous post. It'll be displayed at the bottom of the "General" tab and is referred to as RAM. If the RAM figure shown is less than expected then it's likely that's what your problem is.
Like I said yesterday though, it's a long-shot but worth checking.
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Posted September 8, 2012 at 12:07PM
Secret-Squirrel.
ram checked out ok under general.
T0SH.
i finally got the hang of your message lol ( i think ) reading it again i am confused it shows DMA if available but on reading your mail again that seems to imply it is wrong?
johnny
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Posted September 8, 2012 at 3:01PM
If running ok but slow boot then probably a startup program causing the problem
CCleaner - Tool - startup will allow you to disable each in turn
untill you find which one is causing the slow boot.
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Posted September 8, 2012 at 7:21PM
my thanks for that but i have tried booting with all start ups disabled and no change. but thanks for the info.
johnny
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Posted September 8, 2012 at 7:28PM
Which part is displayed on screen for the 7 minutes before desktop appears? (where does it seem to hang the longest?)
How long does it take to boot into Desktop in Safe mode?
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