very slow boot to post

I have win xp home with 256 worth of memory.

my problem is that for some reason it boots very slow to post, what happens is when i turn on the pc it seems to sit there for a few minutes, then i can hear the network card make clicking sounds for about another 30 seconds or so then the hard drive kicks in and things boot fine. no problems with windows or booting after that.

It only seems to happen when i boot after the pc is down for a while.

the thing is is that I have win xp home on two machines,both networked, and both have visiontek xtasy 9200 cards in them,same config on both machines, but the first takes forever to boot to post and the second boots with no trouble at all.

I have ran both spybot (updated ) and adaware (updated) which cleaned out things, cleaned things up with the disk utility tools so forth and so on.

anybody have any ideas as to what can be causing this?

 

Have you checked in BIOS to make sure your machine isnt attempting to boot from Network?
Also, make sure you have ran an updated virus scan.

If those offer no joy, try taking out PCI cards one by one and see if one of those is delaying the bootup. One may be assigned wrong or even faulty.

 

thanks for the fast reply:

the bios doesn't have the option to boot from network, and I download updated definitions and scan once a week.

I will go the route of taking out cards and seeing if they could be the problem.

I also have a usb mouse and usb all in one printer hooked up, can they be causing any problems ?

 

Wouldn't of thought so unless they are USB2.

Best way is probably remove things one by one. Can be a little tedious I know but also allows you to eliminate possible problems.
Mouse and printer easiest (but unlikely), then take off side and start with cards, first network, then dial up modem remembering to try booting before you remove next item.

PS. Thats booting up, not probably what most users want to do. hehe.

 

go to msconfig; click on services tab; uncheck workstation. cut my bootup time from 2 minutes+ to 30 seconds.

 

This wont be the problem as the machine has a post problem - meaning it doesn't even start Windows untill after.

 

I have removed my network card and still the same problem, I have not removed my 3D card to see what would happen. I thought that maybe my hdd was the problem but a diagnosis from western digital said it was good,
( 40 gig western digital ).


Could it be that my boot records are screwed up?

I am going to try bootvis to see what is going on,and am wondering will it tell me anything even though it is slow going to post ???

thanks for the replies...
Bob

 

One final thing i can think of, then hopefully someone more experienced might be able to help...

Try entering your BIOS and load the default values - just on the odd chance something has been changed.

Everything else I cant see you having a problem with. Maybe memory but then Windows would have problems too...

 

thanks looneytunes for your replies it is much apprichiated ( hopefully thats spelled right)

can anyone who fixed this problem let me know what you did to fix this ...