Slow XP Startup before Welcome Screen

[crossan007]

Hi,
I have an XP computer that is very slow from the time the BIOS gives control to XP until the time the welcome screen is displayed (thie time between them is about 15 minutes, and the harddrive is being accessed non-stop the entire time) The computer is a 2.3GHZ, 1GB RAM, 160GB HD, and is only about a year old. The system was never defragged, so i ran defrag, and a registry checker. I have been working on computers for about 5 years now, and although i am new to xp, i have never seen this kind of behaviour.
any ideas?
thank you

[PrntRhd]

Welcome to the PC Guide Forums!

I would do the usual first, delete the Temporary Internet files, and turn off System Restore and back on again to free up HDD space those files took up.
Then security scans like Housecalls AV, Spybot, & AdAwareSE.
I personally also turn off un-needed Services which makes XP much faster (see blackviper (http://www.blackviper.com) site), be careful to not break Windows doing that though.

[Quantax]

Does it have SP2 installed?

I ask because on one of my PC's installing that via the CD slowed down the boot up time considerably. I wound up having to uninstall and it created such havoc that I had to reformat and reinstall the XP :mad: