My Windows NT4 workstation (Athlon 666, 384 M,a lot of design software)suddenly began to take ages to get started , like 3 minutes comparing to 30 seconds before,and works much more slower now.I have changed paging to 384-400M, installed SP6, cleaned all temp folders, checked for viruses, uninstalled unnecessary packages and looked for help in Microsoft Knowledge base.Nothing seems to help anyway.Then I reinstalled it to Windows 2000 and was , lets say, disappointed to find out the same effect.
Now It seems to be hardware problem, but what?I changed RAM, id did not help.Has anybody got any idea?

Hi Sergei,

I am somewhat familiar with NT 4.0 since I use it here at work, however, I am unenlightened as to how to tweak it much. That's someone elses job.

It sure sounds like you have a lot of background programs loading at startup and then of course, they continue to run in the background while you're trying to work.

I assume that you have all the lastest upgrades and patches, etc.. I believe that there is a SP6a out, but maybe that's what you meant. At any rate, this kind of stuff probably wouldn't have much to do with the performance factor.

Re-trace your steps. Have you recently installed new software and does it load at boot? I think if you go into TaskManager, you can see what processes are running. Become familiar with what each line item represents and if you don't need it, stop the process. Hopefully, you can do several, and see if that helps.

I assume that you defrag your harddrive on a regular basis? Diskkeeper 4.0 is a good defragmenter for NT 4.0 workstation. When you say it seems to be a hardware problem, what specifically do you mean? Have you added new hardware recently, besides the RAM?

I am out of ideas. Post back with any progress you have.

Cheers,

Big Blue 66

Thank you for reply,firstly.
As I said I fully reinstalled NT for W2K.And it still takes TOO long time to start ( taking in account that sistem has just been installed!)and generally systems responds indecently slowly ( 666 MHz , 384 M RAM, 25 GB HDD).I tried to connect HDD to another computer and after Windows 2000 Is Starting I got the message( painfully remaining BSD) about Boot_Device_Inaccessibility.I think the problem is HDD...