s-l-o-o-o-o-w boot

[yankele]

My buddy is running an emachine with a 550 PentiumIII, AMI BIOS (05/18/99) 20G HD, 128RAM and win98. The ONLY problem is slow booting. It takes about 1 minute for the machine to boot before Windows begins to load. When the Windows program begins to load, it speeds up and operates beautifully thereafter. It seems to be some kind of hardware problem since everything is ok once the software kicks in. Cleaned up his Startup configuration. He tells me he defrags every week. Got rid of all spyware. Checked the BIOS settings and all seems normal. Tried to find a BIOS update but he's got a generic motherboard which AIDA32 lists as unknown.
Ideas anyone?


Yankele
ABIT BE6, Celeron 500, 256RAM,
20G HD, Gigabyte GA-GF 1280,
SB PCI128 Win98(orig), IE6, OE6,
AVG, Kerio

 

[ANFPS26]

Does it do a RAM test during startup? You could disable that in the bios and see if it speeds it up. Also, disable virus scan in the bios.

Jim

 

[yankele]

I looked for that in the BIOS and couldn't see any settings dealing with that. I have found an app called Bootlog Analysis which does an analysis of the bootlog.txt file and indicates times taken for each process. I'll have him run that and see what he comes up with.
Watch this space. <g>

Yankele
ABIT BE6, Celeron 500, 256RAM,
20G HD, Gigabyte GA-GF 1280,
SB PCI128 Win98(orig), IE6, OE6,
AVG, Kerio

 

[ANFPS26]

Something else to check:

http://www.intel.com/support/motherboards/desktop/slowboot.htm

Jim

 

[yankele]

Thanks for the tip. Will check it out.

Yankele
ABIT BE6, Celeron 500, 256RAM,
20G HD, Gigabyte GA-GF 1280,
SB PCI128 Win98(orig), IE6, OE6,
AVG, Kerio

 

[yankele]

Well, folks, I did the bootlog analysis on my friend's machine and *nothing* took a long time! The slowest item was his mouse which took just two seconds to load. According to the log, the entire process took 56 seconds from beginning to end but in real time, it was about 2 minutes from power on to desktop. Go figure. Everything has been done that can be done to speed the thing up and we have just come to the conclusion that some motherboards are just slower than others--especially generic ones, we suspect. Intel has upgrades for their cpu's and I'm going to give that a try for him.

Yankele
ABIT BE6, Celeron 500, 256RAM,
20G HD, Gigabyte GA-GF 1280,
SB PCI128 Win98(orig), IE6, OE6,
AVG, Kerio

 

[gwinn7]

This whole issue seems like a cache problem. But you said Windows 98 runs fine after it loads, so that throws the cache suspicion out the door.

I have seen motherboards nearly identically configured running the same processor have completely different performance results. So, it is entirely believable that the motherboard is just not the best out of the batch or you haven't properly setup the BIOS options. Or, there is ailing hardware device(s) attached to the computer causing your performance issues.

Goodluck,
Gary
A+,N+,I+