XP Pro - slow boot

Hello:

Just recently, my computer began booting and re-booting very slowly. Once about 5-8 minutes passes, it's fine, but the initial boot or reboot is now taking 5 times longer than it did a week ago. I initially thought it was I-tunes related, so I transferred all that media to an external HD, but that didn't solve it.

The computer is well-maintained, the 160GB HD is 78% free, and I've done all the stuff in your "basic maintenance" forum, including defragging with the iObit "Smart Defrag" utility. A friend of mine suggested buying a deep registry cleaner/fixer, as he says although CCleaner's regisrty tool is decent, it doesn't clean deep enough. I wanted to check with you guys first. Thanks!

 

Hi,

Stick to Ccleaner. You need to investigate the cause of your sudden boot-time slowness, running random Apps in the hope of curing it is a recipe for further problems somewhere down the line. Have you checked the Windows System logs in Event Viewer yet?

 

No, because I have no idea what to look for there.

 

What takes so long during the boot process? Is one particular portion of it (ie, the manufacturer's splash screen, the windows splash screen, etc) significantly slower than it was before, is just all of it slower?

 

Good suggestion about the Event Viewer: it should be located in Control Panel/Administrative Tools - check to see if there are any obvious patterns there...

You might also try booting to Safe Mode, see if the symptoms change...

 

Both the XP splash screen *and* the Windows spash screen are significantly slower than before. And once the desktop icons load, I still have to wait a while before I can do much of anything - even a right click on the desktop takes a while to register.

 

That sounds like it is definitely a software problem, not hardware then. Try doing a chkdsk to see if there are any bad sectors though, just to make sure.

 

How to view and manage event logs in Event Viewer in Windows XP.

Windows XP event log

 

I did, and there weren't. So should I just check the "Event Log" stuff and see what that says, or do something else?

 

OK - thanks. I'll take a look at it tomorrow and get back to you in this thread. Based on what I've described, should I be looking for anything in particular?

 

Errors and warnings are what you need to set the Event viewer filter for, anything then listed since the PC started booting slowly will need further investigation.

 

Here's the log for the past few days. Doesn't look good to me.

 

Correct,

That error must makeup 50% of the log

The MS take on error 51.

A recent thread relating this error to a nVidia driver issue.

Whatever the cause, you have to get your data backed up fast. What are your system specs, PC make/model and motherboard/gfx card?

 

Thank you everyone, for your help and suggestions, but this has gone beyond my abilities and I don't want to risk messing things up even more by trying to fix something I'm likely incapable of fixing. I'm bringing the machine to a local computer guy to take care of it.

Thanks again all!