Slow loading XP MCE

[hitchface]

Heya folks. Gotta nuther conundrum for you.

Friend's laptop has a slow loading problem with Windows XP MCE. The laptop is an Acer Aspire 5100 series, 1 gig of RAM, 120 gig HDD, X2 Turion CPU and a Radeon Xpress 1100.

He first complained about an error message that wouldn't go away (had to do with photo software, ended up being unrelated) and then told me that everything was very sluggish. Booted up slowly, loaded programs slowly, stuttering sounds, no media playback was even worth it.

I took a look at what he had. Sure enough, everything was slower than a snail. The real delay started right at the XP loading screen. Lasted 5 minutes or so, then finally switched to the desktop and continued loading for another 10 minutes. He had Norton AV and Spy Sweeper as his protection suite. I tried to run Spy Sweeper, but the scan length was an estimated 21 hours and 37 minutes. Both HDDs are less than 15% full. Combined.

I promptly whacked Norton and Spy Sweeper, put on avast!, and Spybot S&D. Scanned with both, and found nothing more than 3 cookies. I put on CCleaner after that, dug up 500 something megabytes of junk, and canned it all. Fixed the issues with the registry as well.

A few restarts in between all of this (after getting rid of Norton, installing avast!, etc) showed slight improvements, but nothing major. Still way too slow.

When the computer first booted up after all of this was done, it sat loading all of the startup objects for more than 10 minutes. Once they were done, the CPU was averaging out at about 60% usage with absolutely nothing happening. RAM usage was about 30%, HDD ACT light going solid green the entire time.

Once that time passed, the system would act like normal. I checked his system processes during the startup (quite a few going, but nothing enough to cause his system to be that slow) one by one, and each one was legitimate.

I know it is detailed, but that is about all the info I have. I am fresh out of ideas. Anything you folks have to offer would be great.

[shadowpr]

did you try to stop anything that's not nessecary from starting up with the computer using msconfig?

i know that could help with the start up a bit.

also might want to look into service.msc and see if anything can be set to manual that's on automatic start and see if that will speed up the startup time.

just a few ideas off the top of my head.

maybe try running those virus and spyware scans in safe mode?

[glc]

Acers ship formatted FAT32. FAT32 is not robust and you may have file system corruption. You need to run chkdsk /f on all partitions and consider converting the OS and data partitions to NTFS, leave the recovery partition alone.

[hitchface]

As far as I can see, the HDD is only divided into 2 equal partitions. Does that mean that my buddy will essentially lose out on 60 gigs?

[glc]

Not at all. There are 3 partitions - an OS partition, an essentially empty data partition of the same size, and a HIDDEN recovery partition. You can see the recovery partition only in Disk Management. Run chkdsk /f on both visible partitions, then convert them to NTFS.

chksdk c: /f
chkdsk d: /f
convert c: /fs:ntfs
convert d: /fs:ntfs

All done from a command prompt.

[hitchface]

No files lost? I dig it. Thanks for the help glc, and for the other thread. You make me look smart in front of my friends

[Big Tone]

I've got the Aspire 5101 which is exactly the same laptop only mine has 100gb HDD with exactly the same problem.

I'll give this a try and pot back the results.

[Big Tone]

Just tryed to convert the partition using command prompt but I'm now faced with a message that say's :

Convert cannot run because the partition is in use by another process. Convert may run if this volume is dismounted first. ALL OPEN HANDLES TO THIS VOLUME WOULD THEN BE INVALID. Would you like to force a dismount on this volume?

Not sure what to do from here. If I say yes will this stop Windows from booting?

Cheers

Tony

[Big Tone]

Sorry for hi-jacking your thread hitch!

Ok, I went for yes, and the conversion to NTFS took place during a reboot but everything is exactly the same.

I'm going to start a new thread for this one.

Cheers

Tony

[hitchface]

Hey man, I saw no hijacking. Helps me to know your results. Thanks man!