Extraordinarily long time on Windows XP loading screen at boot up

[Introspect]

Hi everyone,

I'm hoping for some assistance on an issue my brother is having with his laptop. He brought it to me cause it was "booting slow" and he'd gotten a blue screen of death once. At boot up, it spends about 3 minutes at a black screen with a grey bar going across the bottom, then moves onto the windows loading screen. It proceeds to spend about 15 minutes on this screen, before loading windows. Once it loads, it's a little slow, but some general clean up should take care of that. All virus runs are clean, and he said nothing else abnormal has occured with it. Any ideas as to why this may be booting so slow?

BTW...He is running windows xp pro sp 2

[osprey4]

Hi, Introspect:

Welcome to TechIMO.

How about the make/model? Are you talking about a cold boot or wake-up from hibernation? Have you checked network settings?

[Rootstonian]

That's an insanely long time. Best guess from me? Hard drive going bad

[Introspect]

It's an hp compaq nc6000, network settings appear to be ok, and it's coming off a cold boot, not hibernation.

Rootsonian- That was my first instinct, too...I was hoping someone had a better answer.

[Rootstonian]

You can also download and run MemTest. Get AdAware and run that.

[nopointdrumrckr]

i'm also having this problem, i have a 4 year old dell dimension 4600. i tried to install some ram and i did it incorrectly, so i replaced with the original ram that was in the computer. and with both attempts it goes verrry slow taking 25 minutes to boot up. Geek Squad said that the harddrive may be going bad but i didn't wanna believe them when i just spent soo much money rebuilding (wireless int, graphics card, and new ram) and when i attempt to go into safe mode it locks up and takes the same amount of time to boot.

[RamonGTP]

Well if the problem is indeed the hard drive, it would be hard to come up with a "better answer"

Once you get into windows, you can disable ALL startup items and ALL non microsoft services, reboot and see if the problem persists. If it does, my money is on the hard drive. Before swapping it out, you can always try reinstalling windows and see if that would clean it up.