I’m running XP Home SP2 with all the current updates on a Presario w/AMD 3000+, 1GB RAM, and 150GB SATA drive. Lately (the last week or so), it has been taking a long time for XP to start up. From the Welcome screen to my desktop displaying is 30 seconds, which is more or less acceptable. But from the time my desktop shows to the time I can actually do anything is 2 minutes! To me, that is less than acceptable. I’m not on a business network, just a local user with internet through my cable company, so it’s not like I’m running a server login script.
During the time after the desktop is showing, I can bring up task manager and see that very few processes are running, but also that there is no one listed under the Users tab. It just seems to take that long for me to log in. I’ve tried clearing my prefetch folder, increasing/decreasing virtual memory, and a few other things, but no joy. I’ve run Zone Alarm (latest updates installed on it, too), SpyBot, and AdAware, but they find nothing. Under system properties, I see my user profile is 1.6GB. Is that inordinately large, and if so, how do I pare it down?
I tried doing a system restore to 2 weeks ago, but that didn’t help either.
Thanks for any advice or help you can give. Sorry for the long-ish post.
Tom