long xp boot before loading screen

Well, I had to reformat because my vid card kept overheating and made me restart all the time which screwed up XP. Before that was happening, boot time was quick, about 30 seconds. So I completely formatted and made 2 partitions, a big one and a small one with nothing in it. I installed XP on my bigger partition. Everything went well with the install, BUT right after bios loads, I see a loading bar on the bottom of the screen which takes a couple minutes to load, then it goes on to the xp loading screen, which doesn't take long. It never used to do this, whats going on.

No, it's not spyware.

 

During the wait/loading, is there any harddisk activity? If not, Windows may be waiting for some devices like USB/LAN, etc. Try disconnecting such devices, especially USB ones.

 

there is intermittent hard drive activity during the load, but I don't have any USB devices anyway, besides my mouse.

 

nobody?

 

bump:major

 

All I can say is check your device manager and see if there are any warnings in there. Right-click 'My computer' / properties / device manager. As was mentioned, XP is definitely looking for something.

 

No warnings

 

Just incase, since you mentioned having issues with your vid card, expand the 'video adapter' line to make sure it's fine. BTW, reinstalling XP has nothing to do with fixing an overheating vid card issue, perhaps it was/is dirty. Can you swap another card in there just to see if it helps?

 

I fixed the over heating issue. the fans were really dusty and 1 of the intake fans was flipped around causing no cool air to enter the case. The problem I had with the vid card crashing the system was that the power cable to the card wasn't seated right, sort of arching and freezing the system. Thats been fixed too, all is well with the vid card.

 

bump

 

Long load times could also be a startup program going online for update, but getting delayed due to traffic/down time/whatnots. Run msconfig & disable all startup items as a test.

 

Doesn't make a difference, it's a boot issue. I disabled some things in bios and moved my sata drives in 1st boot but that didn't do anything. Bios is fully updated. It's gotta be a bad install or something. I just don't want to reformat this thing again and have it do the same thing.

 

So what happens with a normal mouse?

 

fixed the problem. the problem was me installing xp. then using my sp2 cd to install sp2, instead of using windows update. Works fine now.

 

Thanks for the feedback,

Take care.