Been working on the wife's pc to get it boot faster. How do I find out the process that's taking forever to boot on the pc?

Specifically, the os takes about 1-2 minutes AFTER the chkntfs program runs to boot....it just give a blank screen and doesn't access the HD (no light indicator)...

Where do I find information to help?

Googling has been fairly futile.


BTW- ran across something called bootvis...trying it out now.

Get a Mac?

I've heard something to do with registers getting messed up or the possibility it's got trojan apps running.

Brute force method would be to wipe clean and reinstall.

As a Mac person - probably not helping much by responding to this.

Do you understand POST? It might be the computer checking the RAM. You can turn that off in the BIOS.

Another thing to do is to check for any items that startup automagically. Check that out in control panels.

Good luck.

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3GHz - The clock is STILL ticking Steve.

heheh...me too.


I've been using Macs since 1988...but wifey insisted on a windows box.

Trying to fix this damned thing.

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All I ever really needed to know, I learned from watching Star Trek.

Will check out POST. Didn't think about it. Using msconfig, I can see the boot lines, and it stops at a thing called giveio.sys. I suspect this file for now.

Running bootvis and optimizing the system, but I doubt that it will make much a difference.

If it doesn't, I'll try to disable giveio.sys via msconfig/regedit. Or may opt to uninstall it all together.

Thanks for the help.

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All I ever really needed to know, I learned from watching Star Trek.

I have one machine doing the same thing (out of three other XP boxes). It started after the power supply blew and I replaced it. Norton Disk Doctor finds a problem with the drive but can't correct it.

It seems to run ok once it is booted so I haven't gotten around to really digging in. (not that I would really know what to do anyway

I've checked out a few boxes lately with XP installed - one had only 128mb, but was zippy (and people here made some suggestions because it had turned into a slug--like 4 minute boot times, etc.) and went way downhill.

Just worked on a P2/400 Friday. It was nice and fast. Guy had 256mb, got an additional 256mb from Lawrence of OWC. It works fine, though some apps aren't great with it (like... stay away from the Gamma Loader for PS 6 on XP).

Anyway, the point was... the HD probably was crudded up with who knows what - and the answer was to simply reinstall the OS.

Dreaded, yes. But having FINALLY just loaded a perfect OS 10.3.9 onto the Pismo and cloned it to the Blue and White (in like 20 minutes) - if you can burn a bootable DVD of the entire install and save yourself the headache and use Norton Ghost with a saved "perfect/virus free" install (not perfect software. Hah!) - you'd probably be a much happier Wife Tech.

Perhaps even an old 4GB drive would be ideal to have around. Load the OS on it and keep it handy to Ghost when needed.

If you do a re-install, make sure to create a seperate partition for it, make a copy of it after you have it updatesd to the latest bells & whistles, then make sure never to install anything onto that partition, always install onto anopther partition.
then when the system goes kablooey, just wipe that partition and restore from your backup, & make sure you do frequents backups, or at least after every update or after every application install or so.

I got the thing back up to par. The trouble was that the BIOS caused an error with the boot sequence...something to do with the loading of devices. I'm not 100% sure, but I found the solution in a thread about mupa.sys.

Apparently, if you tinker with the BIOS, it may cause trouble with the speed of booting. Ironically, the optimal motherboard settings makes my 1.8 ghz Athlon run at 1.4 ghz. However, the boot speeds are much faster. I do not know about the day-to-day use of the machine, though. I'll ask wifey how she likes/dislikes it...or if she even notices a slow down at all.

At any rate, windows troubleshooting is a whole new ballgame...but not too bad, nowadays. Google makes a world of difference...just a few years back, there was no way to find out the errors like now.

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All I ever really needed to know, I learned from watching Star Trek.

Go hither and download the XP tweaking guide on this page.

[www.tweakguides.com]

Then take the time to read it through.

Then take the time to go through and optimize her system as outlined in the guide. You will gain some knowledge and be better prepared to handle problems on the PC and her machine will run better and have fewer problems (with the computer and the wife!)as well!

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Aloha, Ken


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