Dell Laptop booting up really slow - no icons or taskbar

[Chief]

Hi guys

Looking for a little inspiration.

I use a Dell Laptop for my home PC running Windows XP Pro.

Its been running really slow recently (only on my profile though so its probably all the crap I have running on the thing ) but this morning things appear to have gotten worse.

When booting the laptop up, everything seems fine until the two icons are presented for me to click and sign in (one login icon for me , one for the missus).

Clicking my icon results in a 20 - 30 second delay before the small box opens to input my password (normally this would happen instantaneously)

Pressing enter, the laptop continues to boot but after waiting 10 minutes staring at my desktop with the wallpaper loaded but nothing else. IE No Icons, No Taskbar, nothing I thought it may be worth a quick post in here.

Doing a CTRL-ALT-DEL at this stage does nothing either so I just have to physically turn the thing off.

It seems that its just running Sloooooooooooow, I have a feeling if I left it 30 minutes I might eventually see my icons and the rest of my desktop but something ain't right

Any Ideas?

Cheers all

Chief

[Head_Monkey]

Few things to check:
- Do you have any large files on yer dekstop? Lots of large files on yer Dekstop can slow login
- Check yer startup folder (Start - Programs - Startup), and see if there are any programs in there. Perhaps removing them might speed it up

Once it logs in, post a screen shot of Task Managers running processes and we'll ahve a look at what's running when you log in.

You could always just create a new accoutn , and use that.

[computer2slow]

Do you have something scanning as soon as you log in? Or updating?

[Chief]

Couldn't get a screencap of the running processes lads as Photoshop wouldn't open

Nothing out of the ordinary though and definately nothing hogging all my CPU usage.

Looking at the performance tab in Windows task manager the PF Usage (whatever that is ) looks very high and is running at about 800MB as soon as I log on (which took over 25 minutes yesterday). I'd imagine whatever is behind this may be the source of my issues.

Zone alarm wouldn't initialise so has been uninstalled for the time being as it's renowned for being a bit of a memory hog although no changes since the uninstall.

Any idea how I can get more info on the PF usage?

[Head_Monkey]

PF usage is the PageFile Usage. Yer hard drive has a file called pagefile.sys which is used to store stuff from RAM when it is not in use, or when you run out of RAM. Most times the number will be high even if it is not in use because Windows grabs ALL the available RAM and pagefile, then allocvates it as it sees fit.

As for the screen gab, if you can open Paint (Start - Run - mspaint), hit the "Print Screen" key on yer keyboard, then paste into mspaint. then save the image.

I'll have a hunt around for a few more ideas.

[Head_Monkey]

Found a few more ideas:

- If you have a home network, yer PC may be trying to connect to another PC on yer network without luck. Once the PC logs in, check My Computer for any "disconencted" drives and remove them

- A program in yer Startup folder is pointing to a file or folder that does not exist. Remove it from startup

[Chief]

Guys, for info.

Forgot to say, I eventually got this sorted.

My copy of Zone Alarm had somehow become corrupted. Uninstalling and reinstalling it seemed to do the trick.

No idea what happened

Cheers for your help all.

Chief