Boot up - severe problem

[lavaghman]

Hi,
running XP on Dell Inspirion 5100 laptop. It's a P4 2.4GhZ 512MB RAM, 30Gig harddisk with 14.5gig still free.

About 2 weeks ago the machine started to take a long time to boot (maybe 10minutes) where as it used to boot in about 30 sec. This was annoying but once the machine booted it operated fine. I ran Norton AV and it came up with nothing, also uninstalled last app installed and still the same.

But now the situation has deterioted. It may now hang on boot screen. If I reboot in safe mode and then reboot again in normal mode it sometimes manages to reach the login screen but once I login performance is severly down. Also I can no longer gain access to my network so at the moment the machine is in need of some serious attention!

I notice there are 31 or so processes running after I get logged in and this seems excessive, 14 with Username SYSTEM, another 14 with my own username and then process SVCHOST.EXE with Username LOCAL SERVICE and NETWORK SERVICE.

Anyone got any suggestions on the best course of action to take????

Thanks for your time,

John Mac

 

[satrow]

First step (for me) would be to download the hard drive diagnostic program from the manufacturers website.

 

[1101001100110101]

svchost is used by about 10 services in windows so it should show up and most likley more then once.

http://www.blackviper.com/WIN2K/servicecfg.htm

Good site that tells you all the services in Win2000 its the same for XP.

 

[bnikman]

try this:

press F8 during startup
select "Enable Boot Logging" option

What this does is it will create a log file in the \%systemroot% folder called "ntbtlog.txt", which contains a beginning(start) for each device or service that the system attempted to load and an end (success) when each device or service was successfully loaded. Then, you can boot into safe mode with command prompt to analyze the process....

 

[jsauce]

Could also be that services were failing, which will increase the boot time in Windows XP. You should take a look at the event viewer and see if anything is failing or has failed to run, if you manage to get into Windows though you should be able to do it in safe mode.

John D. Saucier
jsauce@magicguild.com
Certified Technician
Network Administrator

 

[euclid]

hi,
get apps that check for spyware...(spybot and hijackthis are possible choices)