Computer takes forever to start from power off.

[The_Eric]

My puter (custom build from Cyberpower PC) takes about 5 minutes to get to the point where windows loads up. It will just sit at the MSI screen and does nothing that I can perceive. It has only not done this a few times. I went through the BIOS and made sure that quick boot was enabled.

Puter specs are:

MSI MS 7390 board
Western Digital WD 3200AAKS
4 gig of ram
AMD Athalon 64X2 5200 (2.71x2)

Once up and running, it will run great. No problems whatsoever. It's just the getting there part. Do any of you gurus have some tips or ideas for me? Maybe a name of a utility I can use to check the system???

 

[simple_gifts]

Switch the boot order to CDROM and disconnect the HD to see if it is a HD handshaking issue. Could be a slow to spin up HD

Might be a situation where selective peripheral removal might tell you something.

Also, any chance a BIOS setting was inadvertently changed?

 

[OVERKILL]

Do you have any USB hard drives connected? I've seen this before where that causes it.

Also, you can hit "TAB" when that screen is displayed and it should show you the entire post, and show you where it is hanging.

 

[Dan4510]

Many things to check.

If you have had the computer a while and installed and uninstalled programs you have lots of links the registry is trying to find.

you can check the registry with ccleaner

Also if you have lots of stuff running in the taskbar after you boot up, everyone of those programs take additional time to load on bootup.

Dan

 

[OVERKILL]

Originally Posted By: Dan4510
Many things to check.

If you have had the computer a while and installed and uninstalled programs you have lots of links the registry is trying to find.

you can check the registry with ccleaner

Also if you have lots of stuff running in the taskbar after you boot up, everyone of those programs take additional time to load on bootup.

Dan


It is hanging at the POST screen. That has nothing to do with the OS.

 

[The_Eric]

Originally Posted By: simple_gifts
Switch the boot order to CDROM and disconnect the HD to see if it is a HD handshaking issue. Could be a slow to spin up HD

Might be a situation where selective peripheral removal might tell you something.

Also, any chance a BIOS setting was inadvertently changed?


Any chance I could get that in English?

I know just enough about puters to be dangerous.
Originally Posted By: OVERK1LL
Do you have any USB hard drives connected? I've seen this before where that causes it.

Also, you can hit "TAB" when that screen is displayed and it should show you the entire post, and show you where it is hanging.


I thought you had it there. I do have an old hard drivein an enclosure for file back up. It is normally off, but I disconnected it anyways- no change.

I think are on to something though. I hit tab and watched it do it's thing. It stopped at "detecting usb mass storage devices". It zipped right on by the hard drive and some other stuff.

Originally Posted By: Dan4510
Many things to check.

If you have had the computer a while and installed and uninstalled programs you have lots of links the registry is trying to find.

you can check the registry with ccleaner

Also if you have lots of stuff running in the taskbar after you boot up, everyone of those programs take additional time to load on bootup.

Dan


I'm pretty fanatical about puter maintenance. I have an auto de frag program, keep the malware and spyware cleaned off (if it makes on my puter) and run ccleaner often.

This problem has happened basically since new and annoys me to no end. As I said before, there are only a few times it hasn't taken a long time to get to the boot screen.

 

[OVERKILL]

If it is hanging at the USB mass storage detection, you SHOULD be able to turn off USB mass storage support in the BIOS. This doesn't mean you won't be able to use your USB enclosure in Windows, just that your BIOS won't have native support for it so you can't boot from it (which I doubt you'd ever be doing anyway).

 

[The_Eric]

Originally Posted By: OVERK1LL
If it is hanging at the USB mass storage detection, you SHOULD be able to turn off USB mass storage support in the BIOS. This doesn't mean you won't be able to use your USB enclosure in Windows, just that your BIOS won't have native support for it so you can't boot from it (which I doubt you'd ever be doing anyway).


I had a feeling you'd suggest something like that so I went looking in the bios and didn't see anything for usb mass storage... I'll look again, but if I cannot find it, where in the bios would I look and what else might it be called?

 

[OVERKILL]

It should be under the settings for the USB controller. I'd also go hunting on MSI's site for a BIOS update. There may be one that addresses this issue.

ASUS had a similar problem on the old P4P800SE board. Later BIOS revisions fixed it.

 

[The_Eric]

You called it! I went digging again and saw something about "usb legacy support", so I nixed that and the puter runs through the sequence like greased lightening.

Since I've got you here, are there any other little tips or tweaks I can do to speed my puter up some more? Like I said, it runs great, but I'm a sufferer of "More's Law"...

Thank you for your help thus far! My dots will no longer be agitated during a cold start....

 

[OVERKILL]

Glad I could help

Set the HDD as the first boot device in the sequence.

There are a number of parameters that I go over when I first setup a system, but really there is nothing that is going to make a huge difference for you.