Boot up?

By any chance are you using Mcafee Virus Scanner?

Cliff

Since you said 'delay', I assume it does eventually finish booting.  Take a look in your startup folder and see how crowded it is (start...programs...startup).  Every program and its brother wants to put things in startup lately, though usually they do it in the registry instead of the startup folder.

You can click start...run, and type msconfig and hit enter to get lists of nearly everything that starts at boot, and disable some of them to see if you can locate the problem.  Don't use it as a permanent fix, just for finding the culprit which you then get rid of, then set your msconfig back to normal.  Make sure yiou know how to start in safe mode before you do this, in case you deselect the wrong thing and need to reset it (hold the ctrl or f8 key down at bootup until you get the menu).

Or, there's a nifty little freeware program called bootlog analyzer:

http://www.vision4.dial.pipex.com/

Just download it to your hard drive, reboot holding down the ctrl or f8 key, and choose "logged".  Then after it's done, run bootlog analyzer, and click the box for failures or delays.  At least it will give you an idea of where to look.

If you can't find programs causing it, try downloading the very latest drivers for all of your hardware and installing.

Gary

Cliff,

I have same problem with windows XP, whats up with Macfee Virus Scan, is that my problem?

 

I have the same problem with windows, XP.  When I restart the computer screen goes blanks, except for cursor blinking on top left of screen, does this for 7 minutes, then loads windows, and everthing is fine, I've done quite a few things with dell support, but nothing seems to be helping, computer is only a month old,

 

4.2 pentium IIII with 512 Ram and 120 Gig hard drive....

and I do have macfee virus program

I've seen a rash of these type of posts the last few days on various boards, and I just remembered where i had finally seen someone admit to their hardware having an issue - HP printers.  The following link takes you to the page for my printer (HP OfficeJet 2210xi) where HP admits that their printer has had a problem:

 "USB Boot-up After installing the HP all-in-one software, the computer stops responding during start up when the all-in-one is connected and turned on. The computer will start correctly if the HP all-in-one is not connected or is turned off."

http://h20015.www2.hp.com/en/softwareDownloadIndex.jhtml?reg=&cc=us&softitem=oj-14039-1&prodId=hppsc2210x79502&lc=en&plc=&sw_lang=en&pagetype=software

You may want to check and see if the problem disappears if you turn your printer off.

 

We had the same problem with XP and McAfee.  It actually would go through POST, then blank screen for 12 minutes, then XP would start - and work - just fine.  He had been using XP for many months with no problems - until he installed McAfee.  (Had been using NAV)

My son's university required them to delete their individual antivirus programs and install the school supplied McAfee IF they wanted to be on the university's network.  This was after the virus/trojan scare in Aug 2003.  That's when the problem occurred.

After 5 hrs tonight of reviewing posts on the internet, deleting temp files, cookies, Norton Utilities and defrag, I went into the McAfee program and changed the settings.  Rather than the computer writing to the log file each time it scans, it just scans. 

Well, boot up is roughly seconds now rather than 12 minutes of agony.  I don't know if we'll be sorry about the scan log not logging, but for now, we're happy with the fast boot again.

Hope that helps someone else!

Bobst2003,

We had a problem with Windows 98 taking up to 20 minutes to boot.  It turned out that McAfee but a command in the AUTOEXEC.BAT file to run a virus protection program.  We REMed out the command to run the program and everything worked fine.  If you're running XP, this is not your problem since XP doesn't use an AUTOEXEC.BAT file. 

Cliff

Hey,

Thanks for the tip, that was the problem after all...

HP PSC 2210 all-in-one.... Now I'm trying to figure out how I can get my printer working, I changed my BIOS so USB doesn't boot up, but now my printer is not connected.  Still trying to download Patch Update thru HP, but having some compilications, but I'll figure it out...

 

Thanks again,

Bob

No Prob.  I discovered it on my printer a few months ago, and I had actually thought it was my Handspring Treo that was causing the issues.  Turns out it was the printer.  Once I got the patch installed, the problem disappeared.

Its me again...

For some strange reason, I can't seem to download patch program, when I click on it, nothing happens, or it locks up computer, I tried other downloads on their site and same problem, is it HP or me...

Thanks,

Bob

I just tried it - downloaded for me nearly instantly.  It's only 100K, so it may have downloaded and closed the window before you even saw it...