Very Slow Boot Up

Hopefully someone will be able to help me :
I have 2 old computers both Pentium 3's running windows XP the first one
(a) is a 700mhz / 12GB hd / 128 mb ram also running windows 2003 with excel - powerpoint & word - networked and various other software...running well no problems. While computer (b) is a 1.0 ghz / 40gb hd / 256 mb ram with office 2003 but I have deleted both powerpoint & word - very little else. The BIG problem is that computer (b) takes fully 6 minutes to boot up.

Can anyone explain to me WHY...it's clearly has a faster processor & RAM yet takes ages to start, the slower pc takes less than a minute to start up.

 

Could I just add that when booting up I do hear a short BEEP noise, which I take to be an indication that something is amiss...don;t what though

 

Hi,

That beep is most likely normal and part of the post. The slow boot could be any number of things like to many things in the startup config. If the computer runs fine other than this then I don't think it is a hardware problem and you should post a thread over in the MG software forum. Them guys are good over there.

Rick

 

Can we safely assume that both computers have the same startup configuration?

Ideally, that would be nothing in the Startup Group and essentials only checked in MSCONFIG's Startup tab.

If the startup configurations are not the same, how do the two machines compare with identical startup configurations?

The reason I ask is that the presence or absence of Office 2000, (with or without Word or PowerPoint) shouldn't make any difference -- unless one or more of its components is being loaded as part of the startup configuration.