Slow Booting?

[Thorax_the_Impaler]

Hello everybody and thank you to all who answer.

Recently I swapped HDD's between two machines for the purpose of more space for multiple OS's on the more powerful of the two. Thus far I have only installed Windows XP Professional, and I'm having a bit of an annoying issue. The computer boots to a useable desktop environment pretty quickly (as it is a fresh install), but network connections LAN and otherwise take about another minute before they become active and useable. When the machine had only an 80GB drive, everything was ready to go as soon as the desktop appeared. Now, it takes longer just for any network connections; anything done locally functions as it should when it should. I've noticed that the status bar icon for Windows Security Alerts is not present until the network becomes active, first telling me that there is no detected firewall (when it actually decides to show up), and then the firewall suddenly is recognized. Is there any way to make this not lag upon booting to the desktop? The new HDD in the computer is 250GB; and the previous one was 80GB, which I assume has something to do with this seeing as I have a drive of the same size/type with a backup installation of XP that has the same problem. Again, is there any way to fix this lag?

 

[Frosty is a Snowman]

If you are encountering the same slowness with 2 larger hard drives, then maybe try turning off stuff like indexing, maybe create a partition so that the OS is on a smaller partition and takes less time to prepare.
I have to be honest I have never come across this before, usually the drive size shouldn't really have an impact on the time it takes for all the services to load and the network to connect.

But then again I do remember XP initially wasn't designed to handle drives large than 128GB, but this was fixed with SP2 and shouldn't cause a problem with boot load times so long as you have SP2 or SP3 installed.

 

[Thorax_the_Impaler]

I keep all my OS's up to date so I have SP3 installed. And I never had this problem on my backup 250GB disk (I reinstalled XP after malware crippled the partition), and after I reinstalled, suddenly this issue surfaced. I think I just need to ugrade my OS honestly.