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fisab68

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19 years ago

F

fisab68

6 Posts

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15712

March 5th, 2007 11:00

Intermittent slow boot

Hi,
I recently bought 2 Dell E521s (AMD chips). I'm having an annoyingly intermittent long delay on bootup (bios screen) - happens on both machines - about once every 5 boots. Sometimes the problem goes away for a while, sometime its very frequent. I'm beginning to think it might be one of the external USB devices (printer and a WD 'Mybook' external HD). Because its not all the time its hard to pin down.
I've even done ctrl-F11 and a full restore.
Then did 20 reboots with no freeze with only the keyboard and mouse plugged in (my poor machine :-) )
Then freezes intermittently when printer and ext HD connected via usb.

Absolutely no problem with these external devices on a dell dimension 5100, only these two E521's.
I'm guessing it doesnt like the external devices. How do I resolve this?
 
Many thanks for any help on the matter.
 
St.
  • B

    bobh621

    1 Rookie

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    553 Posts

    477

    0

    Posted March 5th, 2007 12:00

    Have you tried setting the USB port to No Boot in sysyem set up - pressing F2 as the system boots?
  • F

    fisab68

    6 Posts

    477

    0

    Posted March 5th, 2007 12:00

    Thanks for the reply - much appreciated.
     
    Will skipping the scan of the external devices at boot time only hide potential problems?
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    rockstarrem

    31 Posts

    477

    0

    Posted March 5th, 2007 12:00

    In the BIOS tell it not to check for USB devices so it will boot faster, then later on you can just enable them again. I think that's the main problem here.
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    fisab68

    6 Posts

    477

    0

    Posted March 5th, 2007 12:00

    Thanks for the input.
    By not checking the ext devices upon bootup, does that mean that they have to be manually enabled each time following reboot? If so my mother-in-law (who owns one of these PCs) isnt going to like that!
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    fisab68

    6 Posts

    477

    0

    Posted March 5th, 2007 13:00

    I have no idea why I might need them checked.
    Thats why I'm  here :smileyhappy:
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    rockstarrem

    31 Posts

    477

    0

    Posted March 5th, 2007 13:00

    Why do you need them checked?
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    fisab68

    6 Posts

    477

    0

    Posted March 5th, 2007 14:00

    Excellent, I'll turn the USB check off tonight and monitor it over the next few weeks.
    Appreciate the help.
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    rockstarrem

    31 Posts

    477

    0

    Posted March 5th, 2007 14:00

    The external hard drvies don't need to be checked on startup I don't think, they can still be used in Windows.
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    rockstarrem

    31 Posts

    477

    0

    Posted March 5th, 2007 15:00

    Yeah, just do it in the BIOS. Glad I could help :)
  • F

    fisab68

    6 Posts

    50

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    Posted March 8th, 2007 12:00

    I've turned the USB boot check off using F2 at startup and also only now have boot from Harddriver option and CD checked (in that order).
     
    I still get the occasional bios check delay (less frequently now though)- does that now point to some potentially faulty internal hardware?
     
    Many thanks in advance for any help.

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