XP Pro Slow

radardr · Nov 15, 2006

I have a Compaq machine that I just put a new hard drive in and reloaded XP pro and everything else from scratch.

When XP boots the desktop background picture comes up on screen and then it stops. There are no icons, tool bar, sys tray etc. If I wait for about 2 minutes the hard drive starts to run and XP finishes loading normally. There seem to be no other issues with performance after that. Durning the time we are waiting the hard drive is not running and if I do the 3 finger salute and select the performance tab there is little to no CPU activity during that time.

Any ideas? This is my wife's computer and it is driving her nuts and therefore I am not a happy person.

theefool · Nov 15, 2006

Curious, does safe mode do the same thing?

radardr · Nov 16, 2006

It seems to start normally when in safe mode.

TimW · Nov 16, 2006

See if this helps:
Speed up the Start Menu
=======================

The default speed of the Start Menu is pretty slow, but you can fix that by editing a Registry Key. Fire up the Registry Editor and navigate to the following key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Control Panel \ Desktop \ MenuShowDelay

By default, the value is 400. Change this to a smaller value, such as 0, to speed it up.

Speed up the Start Menu (Part two)
=========================
If your confounded by the slow speed of the Start Menu, even after using the tip above, then you might try the following: Navigate to Display Properties then Appearance then Advanced and turn off the option titled Show menu shadow . You will get much better overall performance.

And a question ...is this computer on a network?

radardr · Nov 16, 2006

OK tried both suggestions with no change that I can see.
Based on your question about the LAN I disabled the NIC (wireless) and rebooted still without any change.
It seems that all of the stuff in the services and start menus waits a long time before starting to load. If I watch the process on the Task Manager screen I can see them start to load after about 2 minutes. This is all of the stuff in the system tray etc. Even the things like the speaker icon and the safe to remove device icon do not load until after the 2 minutes of no activity. CPU usage during this time is less than 4 percent. Once we get through that time every thing loads and runs normally. I have turned off the sync off line files (don't know why it was on).

TimW · Nov 16, 2006

start / run / type "msconfig" and enter ...go to startup and disable as much as you want ...apply and exit ...restart computer ...(you will get a popup box telling you that you are in selective startup or some such...click the box to not show again) and see how it loads up.

radardr · Nov 16, 2006

Think I may have found the problem. I have a Seagate Mirra personal server on my network which backs up both computers. When I de-select it in MSCONFIG the computer starts normally. Now I have to see what Seagate says about it!
Kind of weird that it only happens on one machine????
Oh well, Thanks for the help!

TimW · Nov 16, 2006

The delay then is connecion to the server ....you should have a check box on your network login to enable connection on start up or not.

radardr · Nov 16, 2006

Seagate had me set the mirra service to start manually instead of automatic and that seemed to cure the problem. Machine starts normally now.
Thanks for your help it got me looking in the right place.

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XP Pro Slow

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