Painfully slow bootup

[Agent Ify]

I have been having this problem for a while now... and when i thought it went away it came back again.

Whenever i turn on my computer it takes anywhere from 1-2 hours to bootup... my computer is really fast and is built for gaming. Once my computer boots its as fast as its supposed to be.

I just reformatted my computer yesterday.... took me about 3 hours to do so because its so painfully slow.... and once it reformatted it booted up fast. Once I had shut down however it became slow again.

I looked at all of the usual problems, defrag, i just reformatted so i know too many programs isnt an issue and i have an oem versoin of xp so when i reformat nothing is installed

I dont think its a hardware problem... at first i thought faulty ram... but i used some other ram chips i had around and it was the same.

Then i thought it may be my harddrive but once i get into windows it reads and writes as fast as its supposed to.

My system specs are in my signature and I built the computer myself. I just got a new power supply and i built the computer about 4 months ago. If you can help it would be greatly appricated.

Thanks,
Ify

 

[tom_pearson]

Is it on a network? Sometimes Windows can take ages and get confused with network protocols etc

 

[meatologist]

is it an IDE hard drive? if so, do you have any other devices on the same IDE controller ?

or are there any IDE Controllers that have more than 1 device? ie. 1 CD ROM + 1 DVD on same cable... ?

just a thought..

 

[Agent Ify]

It is an IDE harddrive and nothing is on the same controller... im on a network but if i disconnect the ethernet cable its still slow

 

[tom_pearson]

well usually its better if you uninstall and remove the network card, but on retrospect if you've reinstalled windows and it's still slow then I expect it's got nothing to do with the network drivers. Have you tried your hard drive in another system?