Random Slow Bootups

[Beagle Bites]

Hi All,

Recently have had trouble with random, long (over 5 min) bootups. Happens about twice a week for no apparent reason. Bios screen and windows xp screen come up fine, then it goes black for a while. When windows finally does load, most of my games wont load (Battlefront 2, HL2 etc). IE6 comes up about 3 minutes after clicking the icon - but surfing the web is still fast on my cable connection.

I don't have any peripherals plugged in - no printer, game pad, or anything else.

After first having problem I reformated my hard drive thinking is was virus or spyware even though everything came up clean. Still happens about twice a week. When things work fine, I boot up in less than a minute and my games all work.

I have XP corp ed, updated with microsoft, Pentium 4 3.00 GHz, 768 RAM, Geforce FX 5200.

Could it be my ram or hard drives starting to show first signs or going bad?

Any ideas are appreciated.

 

[sPlAtOiD]

This is a stretch but sometimes when the cdrom drive is older it can make the computer boot slowly.I dont know why it would be ramdom though...

 

[Beagle Bites]

I did have an older CD ROM that seems to spin way more than it should. I uninstalled it and still had the problem. In fact, for the last 3 days, it has slow booted every time.

Again, this isn't a typical slow boot where I wait for all the programs to load... it gets past the windows xp screen then everything goes black for 5 -10 mins. Any other ideas? Now that it is not random, it is driving me crazy.

 

[Outhouse]

Im having a similar problem, but it seems my programs are slightly quicker to load than yours. After quitting the program is it quicker to load the next time you run them?

 

[Beagle Bites]

Yes, once I load a program and shut it off, if I load it later without rebooting, it loads up quickly next time.

 

[Outhouse]

I've found that my HD light stays constantly on while trying to load a program and then it stops and my CPU usage will go up and the program will load. Its as if its having trouble loading from the HD but then why does it work quicker the next time?

 

[Outhouse]

How is your HD partitioned? I had mine as a mixture of NTFS and FAT32 and i thought that had corrupted the windows loading program but all partitions are NTFS and i installed service pack 2 and updated windows (i had the same problem when i formatted before and i thought it was the updates so i left my comp on sp1 this time) but didnt work at all.