pc takes a long time to boot up.

mcwhirter

Hi, I have an amd athlon 3200 processor running windows xp and when i switch it on, it takes a long time to settle down to be able to access anything from the desktop. The harddrive can be heard working away.
It is a lot slower than the pcs at work which are using intel chips.
Is is the amd processor which is slow or is the hard drive slow at accessing info, or is it something else. All help is appreciated,
thanks

BKtje

How long has it been since you installed the operating system on the machine?
How long has it been since you did a disk cleanup or any general maintenance on your machine.

Remove those programs from your startup which u feel
are unnessecary and remove the useless programs from the startup folder, which is under programs in the start menu.
You should defragment your computer using the disk defragmentor which can be found int the system tools area of the accessories. Running a scandisk would do no harm either.

Your registry might also be cluttered but i can't recall the name of the software i normally use to fix that, im sure someone else will chime in.

If all of these dont work it might be an idea to reformat your machine if this is important to you. Remember of course to first backup all data that you wish to keep.

This is nothing to do with intel/amd chips but might also (along with the above) be caused by a harddrive that's on the way out (unlikely unless you hear loud clicking noises). Most likely however it's due to "clutter" in your windows installation.

Other things you could try are adding more RAM to your machine or enlarging the paging file.

mcwhirter

Thanks for the info, the hard drive does make loud noises as if it is constantly searching when booting upDoes that mean it is on the way out then?
If it is, then is it easy to install a new one. Its a 320gb western digital.

PaddyTheNth

Definitely do a defragmentation.

One of the biggest software causes of slowdown of boot time is security software...antivirus, firewall etc - what are you running?

Disabling unnecessary processes/services can reduce startup time also - there's a program called autoruns which you can download from Microsoft which will show you everything which runs at startup and will let you stop them starting automatically.

However, that processor is ~6 years old now, and I'd assume that the harddrive is at least the same.

A newer harddrive/processor would make an enormous difference to your boot times.

If you are worried that your harddrive is in trouble, run chkdsk to check for bad sectore and attempt to fix errors - http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1583&page=5

There's a program called SpeedFan which among other things will check your harddrive for self-reported errors - http://www.ghacks.net/2008/08/07/analyzing-drive-health-with-speedfan/

Capt'n Midnight

use hdtune or the manufacturers diags to make sure the drive is ok
check for malware see http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?f=1009

mcwhirter

Thanks for the replies. I purchased 'Max registry cleaner' and it found over 10000 files for deletion. I also defragmented the hard drive and also deleted a lot of programs from the startup.
It starts up about 5 times as fast now and the hard drive doesn't sound like it is constantly searching.
Programs open much quicker too,
cheers

Capt'n Midnight

should have tried ccleaner first

unnameduser

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

should have tried ccleaner first

+1

or AML reg cleaner

mcwhirter

Oh well, live and learn, the one I bought did the job though.
Thanks for the alternatives. I'll use them for future use.