I have a question about my Dell Inspiron 5150 laptop I thought I?d ask before resorting to calling Dell support.
Recently, it has started a very slow startup routine that I cannot pinpoint. When I turn it on, the Dell splash screen appears and then a black blank screen sits there for 4 minutes, then the Windows splash screen appears, sits on the welcome screen for one minute, then finishes booting up to the desktop. Everything else works fine.
What I?ve done so far: I have McAffee antivirus and firewall installed and updated, and did a deep scan. I used Spyware Doctor, Adaware and Microsofts Beta Spyware to scan for the spyware stuff, and used HijackThis! to clean out items that are no longer valid. Ran defrag and chkdsk. The system is as clean as can be, short of reformatting the harddrive. I?ve researched the Dell forum for similar issues, and also the internet as well. Nothing comes close to anyone posting this type of issue. I do not really want to reformat the harddrive because I do not think that is the issue, maybe the motherboard? Like I said, everything else works perfect, it?s not slow, performance is great, etc.
I have a drive image with XP and Office only that was done in 2003. I also did a Ghost image this past weekend (took 14 CDs and nearly 3 hours!) I could restore the 2003 image, and then selectively restore the programs from the Ghost image. Not sure if a Window repair can be considered since not positive if the registry is the culprit.
Any thoughts, ideas, etc. are welcome and thank you in advance!