Extremely slow bootup time for WinXP SP3 machine?

Satsumomo

Hey everyone. Friend of mine just brought her old desktop PC for maintenance. Pentium 4 3Ghz, 512mb DDR, 160GB PATA drive, with 100GB free.

WinXP bootup time is fine, except that when you arrive to the user select screen, it hangs there for a good 5 minutes, just reading the HDD like crazy. Select a user, wait another 5 minutes to load into Windows. But once you're inside Windows? Everything works fine! Drive speeds are good, programs open up quickly, all's good! What's going on here?

Drive is running in UDMA Mode 6, I'm currently defragging and deleting a lot of old stuff, right now I suspect that maybe some bootup files were compressed in error, does XP even do that?

Satsumomo

So I rebooted after defragging, and computer is near useless, I can't do ANYTHING, it takes ages to open any single window. Getting to the user selection screen is now quick though. Could it be simply hardware failure?

Raern

Is it a clean install of Windows XP? Sounds like the kind of symptom you see when a PC has been run for years without a clean install. Not guaranteeing that'll fix it, but I've seen it happen a couple of times on XP systems.

Satsumomo

Yeah it's one of my easy solutions to the problem, the only thing is that it's an IDE drive, and my computer doesn't have an IDE port I could backup her data with. With the current state the computer is in, I can't boot in to plug in my USB drive anymore. I was actually able to do that early today, it's weird that just after the defrag the computer became completely unusable.

TychoCelchuuu

Stick Ubuntu (or whatever) on a USB stick, boot to that, and see if the hard drive itself is having issues (it might just be deteriorating) or if the computer's fine, in which case you can, from Ubuntu (or whatever) back up her files to your USB drive.

Aioua

Did you, uh, run a checkdisk? (Does it do that as part of defragging? I don't know...)
I'm thinking maybe you had some kind of bad sector that had some boot stuff written on it, and then after you defragged it moved that, but now there's some windows bit stored there.

Satsumomo

Yeah actually when I rebooted it did an automatic chkdsk and I saw some error messages pop up, didn't get to read them, and that's when it apparently started to go reaaaaaally slow. SMART says the drive is OK though, I'm gonna try with Ubuntu. If only my current PC had an IDE connector :P

SmokeStacks

If something happens and you can't boot from USB again you can boot from optical using a Ubuntu Live CD.

You can find cheap IDE to USB adaptors online (or in a lot of older external hard drives) that you can cannibalize long enough to let you set her hard drive up as an external on your PC, then back up whatever she has that is important.

While you're plinking around with her computer, a 512MB stick of DDR will set you back around $15 plus shipping on newegg, and a 1GB stick will set you back only $5 more. A P4 running XP doesn't need an assload of RAM to do it's thing, but if she uses iTunes or even web browses with a lot of tabs open at once having at least a gig of RAM is going to give her machine a lot more breathing room.