|
Well, it seemed the Dell desktop we have was starting to boot very slow. Took around 2 mins for XP to start. It would just sit at a dark screen after the Windows XP Home banner screen was displayed and prior to the desktop being displayed. I did searching and found about BootVis which is a MS program that monitors the boot process and shows some pretty graphical details of how long various components took. I found where to download it - http://www.softpedia.com/public/cat/12/2/12-2-1.shtml - and installed it (default was to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Bootvis) and instructed the program to run and log the boot-up process including drivers. The program rebooted, it took the 2 mins or so to boot and after it booted it launched and loaded the BootVis results. I could see 2 things that weren't right. One was the Registry showed as taking a long time and usbstor.sys took the same amount of time. Now, a few days ago, I noticed the printer light that is normally on wasn't on. I asked my wife and she thought it wasn't ever on except when it was printing. Since it's the only USB device connected, I powered it off. I rebooted and the computer was up in 30 secs. Viola!! I powered the printer back on and the green light I thought was always there returned. Rebooted just to double check and it still boots in 30 secs. Whew!!! |