John
December 27th 03, 12:26 AM
I'm experiencing a very strange problem on a Dell Dimension XPS R450.
This is a 450 MHz. Pentium II with 224 Megs of RAM. It came originally
with Windows 98 but had been upgraded to XP Home. Many, but not all, of
the critical XP updates had been applied when this scenario started, and
the system would boot up in about 2.5 minutes.
I applied the additional critical updates, including SP1, and installed
a few new pieces of software. Along the way, I noticed it was taking
longer and longer to boot, until it got to where it was taking 15 minutes.
I know 224 Megs of RAM is a bit shy for XP, so I temporarily increased
it to 384 Megs by borrowing memory from another system. The boot time
was only slightly reduced. I tried making the swap file much larger than
the 334 Megs the system had assigned. That did no good at all. I
defragged, checked for virii, ran Norton Utilities and corrected all the
problems found by WinDoctor, all to no avail.
I re-installed Windows XP, and that didn't help at all.
I decided to see if a clean installation of XP would help, to rule out
any possible hardware malfunction. I installed a second instance of XP
in a freshly formatted partition with dual booting. The new fresh
install booted in 90 seconds. This led me to the conclusion that there
was no hardware problem, but something seriously screwed up with the old
installation.
I reluctantly reformatted the hard drive and did a fresh install of
Windows XP. It booted in 90 seconds. I then ran the SP1 update, and
after that it was taking almost 9 minutes to boot. I uninstalled the SP1
update, and it was still taking almost 7 minutes to boot. I reformatted
the drive and installed XP from scratch again and it was still taking 7
minutes to boot with the clean install and no SP1. Once again, I
installed a second instance of XP in a separate partition, dual boot.
The second installation boots in 90 seconds and the first still takes 7
minutes. This makes no sense at all! Any suggestions, other than to toss
it in the garbage? Thanks!
John
--
Please reply in this newsgroup. I never post my true
email address to prevent spam. Thank you.
This is a 450 MHz. Pentium II with 224 Megs of RAM. It came originally
with Windows 98 but had been upgraded to XP Home. Many, but not all, of
the critical XP updates had been applied when this scenario started, and
the system would boot up in about 2.5 minutes.
I applied the additional critical updates, including SP1, and installed
a few new pieces of software. Along the way, I noticed it was taking
longer and longer to boot, until it got to where it was taking 15 minutes.
I know 224 Megs of RAM is a bit shy for XP, so I temporarily increased
it to 384 Megs by borrowing memory from another system. The boot time
was only slightly reduced. I tried making the swap file much larger than
the 334 Megs the system had assigned. That did no good at all. I
defragged, checked for virii, ran Norton Utilities and corrected all the
problems found by WinDoctor, all to no avail.
I re-installed Windows XP, and that didn't help at all.
I decided to see if a clean installation of XP would help, to rule out
any possible hardware malfunction. I installed a second instance of XP
in a freshly formatted partition with dual booting. The new fresh
install booted in 90 seconds. This led me to the conclusion that there
was no hardware problem, but something seriously screwed up with the old
installation.
I reluctantly reformatted the hard drive and did a fresh install of
Windows XP. It booted in 90 seconds. I then ran the SP1 update, and
after that it was taking almost 9 minutes to boot. I uninstalled the SP1
update, and it was still taking almost 7 minutes to boot. I reformatted
the drive and installed XP from scratch again and it was still taking 7
minutes to boot with the clean install and no SP1. Once again, I
installed a second instance of XP in a separate partition, dual boot.
The second installation boots in 90 seconds and the first still takes 7
minutes. This makes no sense at all! Any suggestions, other than to toss
it in the garbage? Thanks!
John
--
Please reply in this newsgroup. I never post my true
email address to prevent spam. Thank you.