Archie225

Hi, thanks for your reply. I've found the source of my problems :) Was booting computer earlier (not literally although it was close) & same thing was happening, got past the post & welcome screen, desktop wallpaper came up minus the icons & taskbar. So I opened up the task manager & noticed 6 instances of svchost.exe which I found odd. checked on the web when it finally decided to load up as to what this process actually did & the site I consulted stated that apart from the usual microsoft process this could sometimes be malicious software used by hackers to gain personal information from my PC. This alarmed me (obviously) so I got to thinking that maybe my zonealarm security suite wasn't picking up certain threats. Then I downloaded kaspersky internet security suite, installed that & uninstalled zonealarm and hey presto!!! Computer zips through start-up no problem now so I can only assume that for some reason Zonealarm was somehow causing my system to hang on load-up. I did know beforehand that Zonealarm slowed down the startup times of PC's but not to this degree. I had no other anti-virus or anti-spyware installed & still don't so not quite sure why it would behave this way. Long way for a shortcut I know but it worked thankfully :) My Motherboard drivers & BIOS are current & up to date incidentally, I use MSI live search on a weekly basis & check most of the others manually at the same time. In case you're still interested the CPU usage was 0 on both cores when this was happening, at most it would go up to 3% for a second or so, until it decided to load up obviously. In all it would take around 2 minutes from the desktop appearing to taskbar & icons appearing and the programs to load (antivirus, cordless desktop manager, sound controller, etc) Again thanks very much for your quick reply.

Hi, looking for some help here :) I recently built myself a new computer ( probably my first mistake lol) My spec is as follows : AMD 64 X2 AM2 5600+ CPU MSI K9N SLI Platinum M/Board 1 x Novatech Nvidia 8600GTS PCI-E 256 MB graphics card 2GB Corsair value select DDR2 Ram 667Mhz (running at 667 Mhz) 2GB OCZ Platinum DDR2 Ram 800Mhz (running at 667 Mhz) 160GB maxtor SATA2 hard drive (Boot disk) 80GB Western Digital Caviar SATA hard drive 2 x Pioneer 112 dvd writer Drives Thermaltake Toughpower 700W Modular PSU Thermaltake Mini Typhoon CPU cooler My problem is that windows is uber slow loading up, I had an AMD Athlon 64 3500 CPU with 1GB ram before building this & it actually beats my new computer loading up. The best way I can describe it is like it's hanging, it loads up then my wallpaper appears on the screen as well as the mouse cursor which I can move freely. I can call up the task manager no problem & there are lots of the usual processes but no system, network or local processes. After a couple of minutes or so my taskbar appears & it continues to load as normal. I've run Msconfig & removed unnecessary programs (to no effect). I've used both brands of Ram independently ( making it 2Gb of either), I actually started with the corsair modules then bought the OCZ ones to replace them to see if they would improve things. It never so I'm now using both sets. I've tried putting windows on either hard drive, again it made no difference. I know I made a poor choice with the AMD dual core & should've gone Intel (D'oh) but surely I shouldn't be having these problems, both cores on the AMD chip run faster then my old single core (2.8 Ghz compared to 2.2 with the single core). I'm running Zonealarm security suite which is fully updated (it came free with my ISP for a year so figured I might as well use it, will be using nod32 or kaspersky as soon as the license runs out). I am running Windows XP Home edition 32-bit service pack 2 with full updates (genuine version OEM). Other programs I have installed are : Daemon tools Winavi Video Converter Speedfan Dual Core control centre Speedfan Logitech Wireless Keyb & mouse controller Realtek HD Audio Adobe Photoshop CS2 MSI Live update These are the only ones I can think of that load on start of windows. I'd appreciate any ideas anyone might have before it gets launched out the window (or taken to a computer repair shop), probably the latter lol.