talking a long time to find hardrive

[George Hallam]

when i start my computer up and it is al loaded and i click on MY COMPUTER icon a tourch and file come up it talks about 10 minutes to find my hardrive cd dive what is wrong

[saphalline]

Does your computer take a long time to boot up? How long has this problem been going on? Were there any changes to the system when this problem first started?

[George Hallam]

yes sometimes when i start it up it stays on the black screen for a while i put in !GB of ram do you think it is a memory problem

[saphalline]

It sounds almost like a BIOS configuration problem, but I'd need to know more about the system. How old is it? Do you know much about the hardware inside?

[George Hallam]

well have
AMD athlon 2200+ xp
ATI 9600 (AGP)
1 GB DRR 400
ABIT NF7
40 GB hardrive
( going to put in a 160 GB hitachi deskstar)

[saphalline]

Try resetting the BIOS and see if that helps. If you don't know how to do that on your mobo, just unplug the system and take out the mobo battery for 10 minutes. Then put it back in and fire it up. With a cleared BIOS, see if boots any faster.

[George Hallam]

ok i will but taking the battery out will it harm my pc

[jlreich]

No it won't hurt it. The CMOS holds custom BIOS settings and info about what hardware is in your computer. Removing the battery will reset that info letting the BIOS re-detect what's in your computer, hopefully clearing up your problems.

[saphalline]

No, the mobo battery just keeps the CMOS fed with power. The CMOS chip is what stores the BIOS settings. The BIOS chip itself is never touched unless you "flash" the BIOS with a new version.

Other than that, the battery does nothing critical for the system.

EDIT - Yeah... what jlreich said... ;)

[Paul Komski]

Which Operating System?

Fragmentaion and "loads of gunk" can also have this effect, which can usually be cured by a clean reinstallation and helped by cleaing out any excess gunk.

Taking a long time to access MyComputer is not the same thing as taking a long time to access your hard drive.

[myPCrocks]

It can also be a sign of the hard drive failing.The same thing happened to me and when I ran the Drive Utility on it it was failing.

[George Hallam]

i took the battery out and i still have the same problem but i also cant disk defragment

[Paul Komski]

Which Operating System (version of Windows)?

What happens when you try to defragment? Run a full scandisk or chkdsk to check for errors. Always a good thing to do before defragmenting any drive in any case.