O/T: Question for pc gurus, please and thanks

The system is an HP a720n, Athlon 3200+, 1G ram, 180G EIDE hd.

The problem is that it is extremely slow on startup. The desktop comes up and the icons display, but the taskbar notification area and clock do not display. There it sits for 5 or 10 minutes for the taskbar area to load, or hangs completely. This morning it hung at that spot, gave an error message about Windows explorer but turned to a totally white screen before I could read it.

I have run AVG, MalwareBytes, Spybot, CCleaner, done disk cleanup and defrag with no improvement in performance. Going to try SuperAntiSpyware now, but expect no positive results.

My suspicion is that it's a Windows issue, not spyware or a virus, especially as it runs much faster in safe mode. I have disabled as many startup items as I can(I think, will see if there are more I can turn off).

Can anyone suggest any utility programs that I have not already run? I'd rather find out what's causing the problem than to simply format and reinstall.

Could it be a problem of my user profile becoming too large?

Sure wish I had pursued a career in IT when I got my associate's in networking; I'd have a better ability to fix this now. Unfortunately I wasn't ready for a sit-down type of job then.

But I digress...

Another issue I ran into while trying to fix this darn thing: I put a 500G SATA drive in the same box, installed Server 2003 Enterprise, that part works. But Server '03 doesn't see my 1.5 Tb WD USB hard drive that I backed up my XP drive on; says the drive is "either locked or formatted for a different file system". WD hard drive was originally set up on XP with NTFS. Why won't Server '03 read it?

As an aside: what's the hottest spot in IT today? I know I need some refresher courses; currently practicing for 220-701 and 220-702, so I'm getting there finally.

Thank you to all who reply, I appreciate your time, effort and opinions/suggestions.

Sincerely,
Anthony

Cruise on over to Newbies, They will be able to help!
Jim
Newbies

check out microsoft security essentials. solved alot of slow problems and free

Go to Kim Komando web site and look in her utilities group for registry cleaner's. There is one there from Uniblue that works. Not free for the cleanup but it also has license for 3 computers.

Works.

http://www.komando.com/fixitcenter/index.asp

http://www.komando.com/columns/index.aspx?id=6409&page=1
komando

I have gone to task manager whenever I booted the computer and looked in processes to see what was using the cpu time, superantispyware will use a lot on cpu time on startup. you might have to scroll down to find out what is using the most cpu time, but something will be using 100% cpu which is causing a slowdown. also, as recommended in another response in this thread newbies.com (used to be newbies.ws) is a good and helpful website, also friendly. they can offer some good advice.

Hey Anthony -

If you are handy enough to know about safe mode & disabling startup items, I'm assuming you got rid of anything "easy".

A lot of malware (especially rootkits & or viruses that install themselves as drivers) can have symptoms as you describe.

You might turn on hidden & system files (to see them) and then check the system32 folder in your system folder for any recent additions... If you've got a virus of this type, though, it will probably be easier to reinstall Windows...


Google bootvis & read up on it. Its not a virus tool - it just allows you to see what is taking so long on bootup... It is a good diagnostic in cases like this.

As far as IT as a career goes - it's weakened some compared to the heyday a few years ago, but experienced security guys are in hot demand. Also anyone with a CCIE in networking will have no trouble finding work. Database administration is still pretty strong, too...


Howard