improving speed of boot - Windows XP

[Mikej]

I have just finished building a new PC for my mum - have loaded XP Pro and everything works - XP is now fully up to date with latest opdates.

The only issue is that it takes a bit longer to boot up than I was expecting (longer than my other PC that I made with same spec). The extra time is taken with the screen blank, and the cursor flashing in the top left hand corner - any ideas ??? Is this in Bios or Windows at this stage (it's before I get the first Windows splash screen.

I've selected "Quick start" in the Bios to no effect.

Any suggestions gratefully received.

Cheers,

Mike.

[130tdi]

Have you got a CD / DVD in the player ?

The bios might be deciding which to try and boot from - CD / Hard Drive.

[roop]

Sounds like the BIOS stage. I'd look at the following :

- Have you got auto-detect on all IDE disk drives...? If so, only set it to auto-detect those positions you know you have a device plugged into (eg: PM)

- Have you got a SCSI controller...? If so, is it properly terminated...?

- What is the boot order of the system...? If you have it set to A, CDROM, C it will look at the floppy and CD drive before it boots from the HDD. If you have a non-bootbale CD in the drive, it can take a while to spin this up, realise it's non-bootable and then carry on with C. Unless you boot from Floppy or CD regularly, change the BIOS to boot from C first.

HTH,

Roop

[[k]ar|]

Try googling for "bootvis". It's a Microsoft utility freely downloadable from their site.

You should be able to tell from that what it is that is slowing things down, then take appropriate action.

Hope this helps!

[k]


[edit]
Just noticed when your black screen was appearing - D'oh! . It might help if you told us your exact hardware setup. Just a thought, but do you have on-board RAID enabled? On my Asus mobo, it takes a while to find my (single) drive, but does this on every boot.
[/edit]



>> Edited by [k]ar| on Sunday 18th July 14:54

[Mikej]

Thanks guys,

It's a PC chips M863G with a Duron 1200 processor. I have a CD drive, no floppy, but the BIOS is set to load from the HDD first - I will check that the FDD is disabled. The CDROM is my master and the HDD is slave - could this affect things ?.

NO SCSI, but I'll check that it is only autodetecting things that I have. Don't think I've got RAID enabled - I'll check.

Cheers again - I'll check the settings and report back.

Mike.

[Mikej]

Ok guys a bit more info. - checked first boot device - HDD, second - CDROM, have disabled FDD.

The delay is after going through the BIOS bits (checked IDE devices etc.), then delay 20-odd seconds with black screen and flashing cursor in top left corner, the Windows XP Pro screen then comes up with the bar (with moving blobs) across the middle.

I'm pretty certain that it is between the BIOS bit and the XP bit - Bootvis says that it is running NTLoader at this time - but I've got no idea what that is or how to tweak it - am I barkin gup the right tree ??.

Any ideas gratefully received.

Cheers,

Mike.

>> Edited by Mikej on Sunday 18th July 21:06

[dannyboyo]

Mikej said:

The CDROM is my master and the HDD is slave - could this affect things?

Probably wouldn't affect the speed of the boot up, but it is common practise to have your HDD as a master on the primary IDE bus and the CD drive as a master on the secondary IDE bus. And keep the CD drives to one bus and the HDDs to the other.

I think this is because the maximum transfer speed on an IDE bus can only be as fast as the slowest device connected to it.

So if you've got a shitty CD drive and a nice UDMA HDD it will only transfer data from the HDD as fast as the CD drive could.

Also have you got an Ultra ATA cable (twice as dense as a normal IDE cable) to utilise the UDMA?

Long and short is - keep them seperate!

Also, I'll echo the above. Try to turn anything that is set to "auto" in the BIOS to it's correct manual setting so the PC doesn't have to auto detect it.

>> Edited by dannyboyo on Sunday 18th July 22:24

[Mikej]

Now sorted - I tried putting in another cable to that each IDE device had it's own cable - made no difference.

I then changed the set-up back to both on the same cable, but with the HDD as the Master and the CDROM as the slave and ta da = all working fine.

Thanks for your help guys.

Mike.