Slow to load....

Dell Inspiron E1705 running WinXP MCE. It boots to the desktop OK, not super fast, but it's not super slow either... anyway, the desktop wallpaper comes up, the taskbar comes up, but the icons and sometimes the clock (?!?!) take at least another 2 minutes to load. I've removed some software (ie; Norton) and went thru the msconfig startup menu and cleaned that up just to see if it would make a difference. It helped; the icons come up now after 2 minutes instead of 6 or not at all. What is causing this delay? Could it be massive fragmentation of the HD? Malware? I'm going to do some malware scans right now, but in the meantime, if anyone has any ideas, please post 'em!!!! THANX!

hd2k

EDIT: update- I just ran CCleaner and removed about 1.2gb of :crap!!!! W O W ! ! !

 

Anyone???
Anything???
Please???

 

HAve you tried defraging it?

 

if you don't have a Defrager, here is a pretty good one http://majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=1207

 

Try a defrag, unless ye already tried that.

Also, does it boot ok in safe mode?

Another thing to try, is to use msconfig, and disable all non-microsoft services and ALL startup items.

Does that help? If so, then something within msconfig is slowing things down.

Do you have any usb devices hooked up besides the keyboard and mouse?

 

Yeah, tried all of the above. I did remove some malware, nothing really major (New.Net, MyWeb, etc) and that helped. The KB/mouse is PS2, and I ran 4 different defrags: WinXP's built-in defrag, Auslogics, IOBit, and DKLite (IOBit is :crap IMHO). One boot out of every 4 or 5 is normal; nice and quick. And it loads up fine in safe mode.... I just can't figure out why the icons take up to 3 minutes to appear most of the time. I went trhu the msconfig startup list a second time, and turned off just about everything.... I dunno, it's weird. Anybody else have any ideas why icons would take up to 3 minutes appear? The desktop wallpaper comes up right away, just the icons lag..... Weird.

hd2k

THANX for any help or ideas!

 

HI i had the same problem on my old computer and try boot vis it work great but since your on mce i will show you how to do it with out boot vis
1.restart your computer
2.after your computer has started up leave it for another minute then go to start the click on run and type Rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTask (this will take 10 to 15 minutes so wait)
3. repeat step 1 and 2 and after 15 minutes type defrag c: -b in the run box after the window has closed you will see a huge improvement in boot peformance
:major:major:major

 

Cool! Thanx for the tip. I'll give it a shot and let you know how it went. Thanx again