HP Pavillion a345w takes an extremely long time to boot up

For no apparent reason, my HP Pavillion a345w takes about 25 minutes to
boot. It takes almost 20 minutes for it to move past the HP logo
screen. It then checks the drives, and starts to load my XP Pro. From
there XP Pro takes a little over 7 minutes to boot.

I have defragged the drive, and ran chkdsk /r. The issue to me seems
like it is underneath the Operating System, maybe in the bios. HP does
not have an updated bios beyond the 3.17 that I already have.
Any suggestions short of a rebuild would be appreciated.

Might also be spyware, adware, or other malware. If the computer takes forever
booting up and it is attached to a network, how long does it take to boot when
disconnected from the network?

Run Spybot 1.3 and Ad-Aware SE after updating both with the updates available
from their respective web sites.

Check the BIOS settings for things like external cache disabled.

Run diagnostics on system memory (MEMTEST-86) and hard drive (diagnostics from
drive manufacturer's web site, not SCUMDISK, er, SCANDISK)... Ben Myers

On 2 Jan 2005 10:36:58 -0800, "daferrell" <> wrote:

>For no apparent reason, my HP Pavillion a345w takes about 25 minutes to
>boot. It takes almost 20 minutes for it to move past the HP logo
>screen. It then checks the drives, and starts to load my XP Pro. From
>there XP Pro takes a little over 7 minutes to boot.
>
>I have defragged the drive, and ran chkdsk /r. The issue to me seems
>like it is underneath the Operating System, maybe in the bios. HP does
>not have an updated bios beyond the 3.17 that I already have.
>Any suggestions short of a rebuild would be appreciated.
>

daferrell wrote:
> For no apparent reason, my HP Pavillion a345w takes about 25 minutes
> to boot. It takes almost 20 minutes for it to move past the HP logo
> screen. It then checks the drives, and starts to load my XP Pro. From
> there XP Pro takes a little over 7 minutes to boot.
>
> I have defragged the drive, and ran chkdsk /r. The issue to me seems
> like it is underneath the Operating System, maybe in the bios. HP does
> not have an updated bios beyond the 3.17 that I already have.
> Any suggestions short of a rebuild would be appreciated.

http://www3.telus.net/dandemar/slowcom.htm is a place to start with slow
booting. In addition to what Ben has offered, do a manual search on
your drive for very large files, greater than 100000 KB (100MB). There
have been reports of very large files appearing on some XP computers
with startup issues - I do not recall the sources. These files chew up
HD free space and make loading Windows very slow. I would disconnect
from the internet, disable firewall and antivirus (and any associated
services in Administrative Tools/Services) and see if that makes a
difference.

Also try from a command prompt: sfc /scannow to check the integrity of
system files. Check the integrity of the HD with chkdsk /r run from a
command prompt - it will ask if you want to reboot and the answer is
Yes. In Task Manager, review all running processes with Google to
verify that there are no rogue processes running.

Q

daferrell wrote:
> For no apparent reason, my HP Pavillion a345w takes about 25 minutes to
> boot. It takes almost 20 minutes for it to move past the HP logo
> screen. It then checks the drives, and starts to load my XP Pro. From
> there XP Pro takes a little over 7 minutes to boot.
>
> I have defragged the drive, and ran chkdsk /r. The issue to me seems
> like it is underneath the Operating System, maybe in the bios. HP does
> not have an updated bios beyond the 3.17 that I already have.
> Any suggestions short of a rebuild would be appreciated.
>

How log does it take to get to the setup screen? If this is quick, then
your hardware is probably OK. However, if this also takes a long time,
then there is a good chance you have a hardware problem. Nothing in the
OS is read on the way to the startup screen. So, if much of the extra
time is all before the OS starts to load, then start looking for a
hardware problem.

craigm

Test it in Safe Mode without networking. Is it normal?
"craigm" <> wrote in message
news:zTfCd.13355$...
> daferrell wrote:
>> For no apparent reason, my HP Pavillion a345w takes about 25 minutes to
>> boot. It takes almost 20 minutes for it to move past the HP logo
>> screen. It then checks the drives, and starts to load my XP Pro. From
>> there XP Pro takes a little over 7 minutes to boot.
>>
>> I have defragged the drive, and ran chkdsk /r. The issue to me seems
>> like it is underneath the Operating System, maybe in the bios. HP does
>> not have an updated bios beyond the 3.17 that I already have.
>> Any suggestions short of a rebuild would be appreciated.
>>
>
> How log does it take to get to the setup screen? If this is quick, then
> your hardware is probably OK. However, if this also takes a long time,
> then there is a good chance you have a hardware problem. Nothing in the OS
> is read on the way to the startup screen. So, if much of the extra time is
> all before the OS starts to load, then start looking for a hardware
> problem.
>
> craigm