ok my windows xp computer is now pausing on boot and taking a long time to come to a usable desktop. What happens is right after the computer comes to the welcome screen it comes up with the background and sits ther like that for several minutes and then finally the desktop appears. Sometimes to speed up the process ill control alt delete and kill the explorer process and then restart it. it seems to happen with my laptop after 2 or 3 months of using it. in the meanwhile ill be looking for answers on google. any help is appreciated
Well, there are a few things you may want to take into consideration: Try testing for bad hardware. Run memtest and DFT (Drive Fitness Test) or an equivelent and see if either one come up with any errors. Do you have antivirus and spyware protection? And I specifically am asking if you have BOTH because you are going to need both. Infections from either one can significantly affect your boot time. Also, check your startup items and remove anything that you do not want or need. You can do this by going to start - run- type 'msconfig' and go to the startup tab. A lot of programs will put unneccesary items in your startup and it'd do you well to rid yourself of them Lastly, download a trial version of either Ccleaner or registry mechanic and run one or both and see how many registry errors it comes up with. Fix whatever errors they find. When Windows boots up, it can slow down while searching for registry items that are not linked to anything on your system. Hope this list can help you. Let us know if this helps or if you are still looking for a solution.
First of all ill try these but i just ran a registry editor and i have all the spyware and virus stuff and i have a lot of the startup programs disabled that i don't need. One thing that is interesting is that, during a normal boot the computer acceses the hard drive almost constantly and my computer stops accessing it for the most part while it pauses and then in a couple minutes the hard drive activity goes up and the computer comes to a usable state.
from my memory of XP, try a clean reinstall of XP SP2 and don't enable networking (internet) until you have good antivirus & firewall
What AntiVirus are you using ? Some AV's will scan boot sectors and that will cause a slow start up. Also it could be a hardware problem... allot of times the only way to fix this,Is by a total reinstall..
