Windows XP Startup Time is slow with Boot Camp

Ever since the first time I started Windows XP via Boot Camp, it has taken a VERY long time for XP to finish loading. After the black Windows XP screen, which can take 30 seconds to get through, the blue "Welcome" screen takes 1.5 minutes to finish (I've timed it.) At the desktop, everything runs fine. I know I shouldn't expect XP to load any where near as fast as OSX, but I know XP never took so long on my PCs...
Is this normal for Boot Camp? I honestly find it quite discouraging to do anything Windows related because of it. What are your load times? Will a Windows reinstall fix it? I'd rather not reinstall Windows if it will do nothing.

Thank you,

Sean

Are the drivers correctly installed for everything? That seems awful long to me, especially on a newer iMac.

My nearly 2 year old iMac was faster than that on XP and even Vista.

Make sure Boot Camp is up to date. Also, make sure that NO apps are set to run at startup on the Windows side. Microsoft loads its core drivers at startup. I have seen Windows take that long, or longer, on a regular PC.

I believe I have Boot Camp 2.0. I see that there is a 2.1 available. After updating Boot Camp, do I need to do anything to my Windows installation? I thought Boot Camp only created the partition and provided drivers... If I update Boot Camp to 2.1, do I install new drivers? Re-create my partition? Reinstall Windows?

Thank you,

Sean

EDIT: Going to install 2.1. I'll let you know what happens...

EDIT 2: The update file I found is for Windows. Is Boot Camp updated through my Windows XP? That's strange. Unless it's just the drivers...

EDIT 3: It appears I DO have the Boot Camp 2.1 drivers installed. I expected that my Boot Camp Assistant would show 2.1 as the version, but alas, it's the Windows Boot Camp application that is 2.1. Confusing... So, I'm still stuck.

How much of your hard drive did you partition for Windows? Considering how much physical space you gave Windows, it may not be able to grab enough RAM to be speedy.
RAM and HD space is like a mouse in a maze. The larger the HD, the bigger the maze. Add more RAM and you widen the halls for the mouse, making it easier and faster to move around.

I partitioned half of my 1 gig drive. I have 4 gigs of ram.

Chauncey said:

I partitioned half of my 1 gig drive. I have 4 gigs of ram.

Click to expand...

I suspect that's a typo since XP won't fit in 1 GB. And yes, the Boot Camp 2.1 update must be run from within Windows since it's a Win executable file.

Post back with correct info so we can try to figure out why Windows is booting so slow.

Regards.

Sorry, I meant half of my 1 terabyte drive.

If possible, start up windows in Safe Mode. See if it hangs up on any driver loading or any other startup items. Sometimes windows will hang up on one thing longer than others.

Ok, I started in Safe Mode, and it obviously started MUCH faster. I'm unsure how I'll narrow it down to a specific driver though... I was unsure if I was supposed to be watching for anything slow on the loading text, so I did. The last thing that it stopped and seemed to take a while on was "agp460.sys" but I have no idea if that is normal.

"agp460.sys" may be your graphics driver. Not 100% sure. If that's the case, maybe try updating your video driver. Is it NVidia? You've got me stumped with this one.

Should I reinstall my Boot Camp drivers or should I download the Nvidia driver?

I don't know if you even have NVidia graphics. You could open System Profiler and check the graphics. Again, I don't know if this is your problem or not.

I have this EXACT same issue. I actually tried uninstalling and reinstalling my bootcamp drivers as well. So far, I haven't seen any improvement. Let me know if you come across a solution.

I kind of gave up... I had a copy of Vista lying around, so I gave it a go. Works like a charm and boots as fast as Vista (on PC) ever has. Certainly MUCH better than I was getting with XP (on Boot Camp).

Safe mode, then normal mode again

We were having this problem and then found if you boot in Safe Mode, log in, and then switch back to normal mode and reboot the problem goes away. I have no idea how this works but it seems to.

BootVis is an unsupported tool designed by Microsoft to optimize boot times in Windows XP. It was originally designed for system integrators to tune their default software loads in order to have new machines boot in about 30 seconds.

I've used this tool with great success on a number of machines and would recommend it. You can download it here.