Windows hanging during boot

[canooten]

I'm looking at a laptop for a family member that's seriously hanging during boot.

It's a fairly new HP laptop running WinXP SP2....it's taking about 12 minutes to fully boot. Windows starts normally until the desktop loads. The taskbar comes up (partially) and it hangs with very little drive activity for well over 10 minutes. Then the taskbar programs start loading slowly and it finally runs normally after Windows boots fully.

I started in safe mode and it worked normally, so it's got to be a program or application that's loading at boot.

There's really not much junk loaded on the system besides all the preloaded HP crap. I suppose some of that could be the issue.....

What's the best way to diagnose this? Change to selective startup and add apps until it starts screwing up again? If so, what absolutely has to be checked in selective startup to start with?

 

[molsen]

download quickstart: http://www.snapfiles.com/get/quickstart.html

eliminate unecessary programs

download MS Bootvis: http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=664

trace > next boot + driver delays > ok

after reboot, don't do ANYTHING until bootvis has opened again and results are displayed. then:

trace > optimize system > reboot now

 

[superdave1984]

Dump everything in your prefetch folder too. Run msconfig and see what is trying to load on startup. And defrag.

 

[canooten]

Wasn't sure exactly how Quickstart worked, so I didn't do anything with that, but Bootvis took care of a good bit of the problem. After optimizing it cut the boot time down to only a couple of minutes. I was then able to uninstall some programs (found that there were two antivirus programs installed) and then whittled down some start programs via selective startup and now it's booting pretty fast. Not sure that it's as fast as it should be, but it's worlds better than it was.

 

[Law]

What's the main spec? You probably have Norton running?

Even though it's new, it wouldn't take that long (10 minute) to load, come on (a P3 650Mhz loads XP faster than that). So I suggest doing what the above users are saying. And also do a spyware scan, you can never be to sure.

 

[canooten]

It did have Norton on it (as well as AVG) and that was some of the problem. Well, 2 parts of it...2 AV programs and one of them was Norton.

 

[molsen]

yea norton is a huge system hog. AVG is a top notch FREE virus scanner that doesnt use much resources. use it.