Slowed down T22

[ferris]

Hi Ferris here,
I have a Thinkpad T22 with 256Mb RAM and 20Gb HDD (partitioned 9Gb/11Gb) . It had been working very well up to a month ago when it started to take about 6 minutes to finish loading Windows XP.
Since then I have got the latest Bios update from IBM
Defragged the disk
swopped some memory modules
swopped the CMOS battery
and reformatted and put XP home (SP2), reformatted again putting on XP professional and finally repartioning and reformatting using FAT32.
None of this has made the slightest difference to the load time.
I still get the three little blue boxes racing across the bar at the opening screen over and over again. (The HD LED is doing overtime too).

Any ideas gratefully accepted

Yours

Ferris

[Thinkpaddict]

Ferris,

Welcome to the forums.

Are you saying that you have tested clean installations of WinXP and still had these problems? If that is the case, either your HD has some problems or (more likely, and better news) your computer is having some problems during initialization relating to networking.

You might try getting a piece of software called BootVis (search for it in Google), which can help you trace problems during bootup.

As an experiment, try to boot up without being connected to any networks and see how fast you boot up.

Please report back with your process.

Regards.

[skygodtj]

yeah, thats a big time item... remove the network card and reboot, timing and see how long it takes to finish booting.

[ferris]

Thanks Thinkpaddict (& Sky),
Yes they are clean installations. (about 5 in as many days). I made sure that the network card (pc card) was out so it would no be detected on the install. However when the Installation procedure asked about networks I told it to allow windows to automatically detect everything.

I also downloaded PC Doctor (for thinkpads) but although all the tests were run nothing showed as being amiss.

Once the machine has actuall lloaded windows everything works perfectly. Would that be possible if the Hard Disk had developed a fault.?

I shall find bootvis (tried looking for it on Microsoft a few days ago but couldn't fin it - will look elsewhere).

Yours gratefully (and desparately)

Ferris

[Thinkpaddict]

It is not likely that the delay that you experience during bootup is due to the hard drive, since it will work fine after that. I say it is not likely, but I suppose it is still possible that there's a problem with the boot area of your HD causing the computer to take a long time to boot up and then working better once the bootup process is done.

Bootvis is a quick find in Google. Running it might give you some pointers as to where the delay in bootup is coming from.

Did you try disabling your network interfaces in Control Panel and restarting the computer to see how long it takes to boot up? See if you can notice a difference that way.

[ferris]

Thanks again,
I have downloaded Bootvis and run it. Difficult to interpret the results as I don't know what are the benchmarks. But There doesn't seem to be any reporting of errors etc.

I have disabled all Network connections and removed all cards.

Surely the Hard Disk and memory can't go wrong intermittently and yet allow proper performance once the machine decides to boot up and load.

What are the other things it might be ple-e-e-e-ase.

Yours


Ferris

[rkawakami]

Surely the Hard Disk and memory can't go wrong intermittently and yet allow proper performance once the machine decides to boot up and load.

Memory and/or hard drives can be quite fickle sometimes, and please stop calling me Shirley. (Sorry, couldn't resist )

Since it appears you already have a copy of PC Doctor and your problem only seems to be when starting up, try running the Surface Scan Hard Disk diagnostic (under the Utility headiing) and select the write/read option. This will take a long time (about an hour and a half for 20GB I think) and may cause alteration of data in some sectors (i.e. another re-install may be needed afterwards).

I'm assuming you've already run the memory diags in PC Doctor and come out clean. If so, try downloading memtest86+ and running that. It's possible that PC Doc is missing something which memtest86+ may cover.

If that doesn't point out any problems, then perhaps trying another disk drive is in order. You mentioned about swapping memory modules. Were these different module(s) you used or were you merely removing and/or exchange the same ones in the slots?

Another thought just occured to me... Have you tried running the laptop for several hours (warming it up) and then re-booted? Does the slow startup still exist?

[dsvochak]

1) Go to "Control Panel-->Performance and Maintenance-->Administrative Tools-->Event Viewer". Check in the 3 categories in Event Viewer for any "Warning" or "Error" messages in the right panel.

2) Under "Computer Management" in "Administrative Tools", select "Disk Management" in the left pane. If the right pane shows the drive as "healthy", it's not likely the drive is failing.

3) This isn't likely but, Right click "My Computer" and select "Properties". Select "Device Manager" under the "Hardware" tab. Expand "IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers". Right click "Primary IDE Channel" and select "Properties". Under the "Advanced settings" tab, make sure that "Transfer mode" is "DMA if available" and not "PIO only". Repeat for "Secondary IDE channel".

If any of the above gives a result that might explain the slow boot up, let us know.