Boot sequence now very slow with pauses

[cloudcroft]

When I boot my Windows98 machine, it appears to load for a second, then pause, etc. For instance, when it goes through the sequence of counting down the total amount of ram installed, it will count 4-5 MB of ram, then pause, then 4-5 more, then pause, ect, until it has counted through the total. It does this sort of thing through the whole process. When I hit escape to strip the Dell logo screen from the screen so I can see the boot process, the logo screen disappears a little at a time, pauses, then a little more. The power went off this morning for a second, then came back on, and the machine rebooted. I went into setup to see if I could see anything, and it takes 11-12 seconds for setup to respond to a keystroke while navigating through setup. But once Windows 98 boots up, everything seems to be fine. Any ideas?

 

[Mulga]

You would seem to have a problem in the BIOS. Try resetting it to default values, there should be a motherboard jumper for this or you can remove the battery for a few minutes. If this does not work a BIOS flash may rectify it, on the other hand it could kill the BIOS completely, rendering the mobo useless. Your choice, is the problem bad enough to take the risk?

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[cloudcroft]

Thanks for the reply. I noticed this morning that my scanner wasn't working (USB 1.1) I finally disconnected from the USB hub and rebooted, and it rebooted normally. I had read that USB 1.1 could do some weird things, but this is ridiculous. I had a tough time getting the scanner working again, but finally did it, then found the printer (both HP) wasn't working, so had to uninstall and reinstall, and it's working. Don't know if the electrical power drop caused all this, but I wish someone could explain how the USB scanner caused the boot problem.