Win98 and long boot-up time

[EarAche]

Greetings....
I have a gaming system at home that runs win98. Every time I power on, after the post screen I get a blinking cursor for about 30-45 seconds, maybe even longer, then it will finally load into windows. It is a simple bare bones system as far as software. I am wondering what I can do or try short of nuking and reloading from scratch. I did enable or disable the fast bootup option in the system settings, (or was that fast shutdown, I forget).

Thanks in advance.
PS - It is a custom system.

 

[cdogg]

You may want to take a good look at the autoexec.bat and config.sys files and see if anything looks suspicious. If it hangs before you even see the Windows Logo, then it's most likely going to have something to do with one of these files...

 

[paparazi]

Go to Start, then run, type in msconfig, check the box for sellective startup, go to sellective startup tab and uncheck everything that doesn't look windows orientated (applications running in the background) press apply and you will be asked to restart.
All these applications that were being loaded up automatically in the background won't load, this should cure the problem.
You can now try enabling them one by one if you want to establish which was causing the problem.
The system can be run on sellective startup if you wish, just be careful not to disable thing that your system needs.
You can always go back to full application load by checking the normal startup box after typing in msconfig. Martin
Vote if you found this post helpful please!!

 

[cdogg]

In addition, avoid unchecking anything from autoexec.bat or config.sys. It is better to open those files up in a text editor and comment out the command lines by inserting REM at the beginning.

 

[CyberVenom]

If the splash screen is disabled (It is controlled by MSDOS.SYS in Win98), you will see a flashing cursor instead of a splash screen. It is annoying because you don't get Billy boy's pretty blue progress slider at the bottom of the screen, so you get impatient sooner. It is not at all uncommon for Windows to take 30 seconds or more to pass the splash screen or lack thereof.
If This is the case, open "C:\MSDOS.SYS" (a hidden file) in an editor and change "bootlogo=0" to "bootlogo=1" (or something like that. I don't have a win98 computer here right now to verify the name of the field, but it should be obvious which one.)