Computer "hangs" at start-up

Hello, all. Once again, Thanks for any advice you can give me - this is only a mild probelm so far, but I hope it doesn't get worse.

I came home from work yesterday and started up the computer from "hibernate." After the windows splash screen, the computer usually goes through the system check (hard drive controllers, etc). During this normal sequence, however, the computer froze checking the PCI controllers and hung there for about ten minutes. I waited, and the computer finally came online. Thinkning it was a by-product of the hibernate mode (which I rarely use), I computed normally for a while, but noticed some serious loading lag and a few errors (windows media player and power dvd both froze and had to be shut down, but I was in the process of converting a PAL dvd to NTSC, so there may be some compatability issues there). Thinking it best to start fresh, I shut the computer down for the night and went to bed.

Upon waking this morning, I restarted the computer from a complete power off mode, and it once again hung at the exact same spot during the system check (PCI controllers). And once again, I am noticing some load lagging, but not as severe as yesterday.

Like an idiot, I was playing around with virtual memory settings the other day, and changed a value in the registry. However, I changed it back after noticing no apparent difference. The procedure I followed was listed in this thread:

http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=62811&highlight=hang

and cross-listed on this web-page:

http://www.techbargains.com/hottips/hottip12/index.cfm

I was having VM problems with another computer, and was looking for some tweaks for it, and the advice I got from MajorGees members has significantly improved the performance of the other machine. So, I thought to myself, why not try some tweaking on my brand-new, fully functional, not-a-scratch-on-it computer? Hopefully I didn't screw it up too much!

The pertinent system information is listed below. Thanks again for any help you can provide. This is starting to bug me.

3.2 P4 w/ HT
512 MB RAM
200 GB HD
Windows XP SP2 (I'm convinced xp stands for X-tra painful - linux here I come)

Cheers,
faque

 

Check your device manager and see if there is any yellow exclamation marks.
Also post your virtual memory size.

 

Thanks for responding, kadavill. Believe it or not, it was your advice I was following in the other post, so I appreciate your assistance.

Device manager was free of any warnings. I rebooted, and it hung once again at the exact same spot on the PCI device list.

My VM size is 768 min, 1536 max.

 

Dont think it is VM.
You can try defraging the page file,http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/pagedefrag.shtml
And optimizing bootfiles,
Run>
Rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks
Copy and paste the previous line into the run box.

My guess is you are having a driver problem.What are the latest softwares/drivers you installed.And does windows work normally after startup?More information about your hardwares will be needed.

Take device manager>find and rightclick pci controller>properties>look under the general and resources tab.