Upgraded PC and now it takes forwever to boot?

[Fred Bloggs]

Well, last weekend I pulled the old socket A Athlon XP 2000 motherboard etc from one of the PC's at home and installed a whizz-bang Phenom II with 4 Gb DDR3 RAM and all good stuff. Possibly spoiling the ship for a ha'peth of tar, but as the PATA hard drives (2 off) are only a few months old, I reused them rather than install new 2 SATA II drives. Snag is, when it is all booted up it runs great but it takes probably 5 to 6 minutes to complete booting. The desktop comes up OK but it takes about another 3 to 4 minutes before applications can be opened after the desktop loads. It never used to to do this with the old Athlon system (it used to boot up pretty quickly) so I suspect I really need to invest in 2 new SATA II drives after all. Do the techies here think that sounds likely? Thanks.

[pzz76077]

Well, last weekend I pulled the old socket A Athlon XP 2000 motherboard etc from one of the PC's at home and installed a whizz-bang Phenom II with 4 Gb DDR3 RAM and all good stuff. Possibly spoiling the ship for a ha'peth of tar, but as the PATA hard drives (2 off) are only a few months old, I reused them rather than install new 2 SATA II drives. Snag is, when it is all booted up it runs great but it takes probably 5 to 6 minutes to complete booting. The desktop comes up OK but it takes about another 3 to 4 minutes before applications can be opened after the desktop loads. It never used to to do this with the old Athlon system (it used to boot up pretty quickly) so I suspect I really need to invest in 2 new SATA II drives after all. Do the techies here think that sounds likely? Thanks.

Vista??

PZZ

[Fred Bloggs]

Vista??

PZZ

Sorry, no XP Home SP3.

[pzz76077]

Sorry, no XP Home SP3.

What do the app and system logs tell you??

Have you checked that all the drivers are correct and latest version??

What does the CPU and memory graphs in Task Manager say immediately after booting to the desktop??

Did you reinstall everything or just plug the existing drives into the new MB??

PZZ

[Fred Bloggs]

What do the app and system logs tell you??

Have you checked that all the drivers are correct and latest version??

What does the CPU and memory graphs in Task Manager say immediately after booting to the desktop??

PZZ

1 I'll have to look, thanks.

2 All drivers and windows updates are latest up to date.

3 Puzzlingly, the CPU activity is between 0 and ~6% and memeory usage is low (nothing anywhere like 4Gb) right after the desktop first loads, no applications running and the list of running processes grows slowly from about 20 odd to 40 something, during this time the HDD LED is almost never lit either.

Hmmmm, added- I have noticed that Avast! is behaving strangely. I'll have to sort this out first, it is saying "RPC error" and will not run in the background, it has a disabled icon in the system tray. Unusual to have a problem with Avast.

[DSW]

I assume that you didn't re-install the OS? In which case it could be a little painful.

You probably need to check that everything is happy and cosha in device manager.

Does task manager show the right number of cores (phenom II should show 4)

its not going to be a proper bottleneck; its waiting for timeouts or something is not as it expects. probably need to have a look in the system log in the event viewer.

It should only take a few seconds (30 tops) to hit the desktop with a system like that.

After that you get into things like checking that the drives are running in ata-100 or whatever and that its not set everything dog slow in the bios (although I would still expect it to be quicker than your system!)

computers hey, simples

[Fred Bloggs]

Thanks DSW, PZZ prompted me to look at the application logs which pointed me in the direction of Avast! falling over. I have downloaded the latest version of Avast!, switched a few things off in msconfig and things have improved markedly. Not quite as fast as 30 seconds to the desktop, but probably as good as the Athlon was right now. Now, I just need to check out a few things as you suggest and perhaps Robert will be my mums brother!

(Incidentally, a "windows repair" and reinstalling XP SP3 sorted out the mobo change nicely!) Thanks, it's been a help.

[JoJoGabor]

Have you changed from a UNiprocessor to Multiprocessor system? If so update the HAL in device Manager under computer to multiprocess HAL.

[pmeswani]

Thanks DSW, PZZ prompted me to look at the application logs which pointed me in the direction of Avast! falling over. I have downloaded the latest version of Avast!, switched a few things off in msconfig and things have improved markedly. Not quite as fast as 30 seconds to the desktop, but probably as good as the Athlon was right now. Now, I just need to check out a few things as you suggest and perhaps Robert will be my mums brother!

(Incidentally, a "windows repair" and reinstalling XP SP3 sorted out the mobo change nicely!) Thanks, it's been a help.

I would also suggest downloading something like Driver Detective and download any new drivers that may be available for your system. You will be surprised how many drivers you may need to upgrade.

[Fred Bloggs]

Have you changed from a UNiprocessor to Multiprocessor system? If so update the HAL in device Manager under computer to multiprocess HAL.

Thanks, don't know what this means, but I'll take a look when I get home thanks.