slow boot up

[zconcptcod]

Since moving a 20g hard drive from a dell gxi450 to a dell gx1 500 the initial boot up takes up to 3 mins. Can any one suggest why this is taking so long? Are there some settings I can amend? P.S the OS is win 98

[Cactus]

Is the 20GB drive the one with the OS on? Is that the only HDD in that PC now or have you got several others attached as well? If it's the only HDD, and the Windows 98 installation is from the old PC then that would probably explain it. You need to reinstall Windows on that drive because it's probably confused that so much hardware has changed. You can get away with relatively small hardware changes without reinstalling Windows, but something as major as a different motherboard and CPU for example, they require a Windows reinstallation.

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If you've got more than one HDD in there, it might be down to fragmentation. Try running "Disk Defragmentor" and see if that speeds up your boot procedure. Are you sure you've got the jumpers configured correctly, i.e. Master and Slave? What is taking the longest during POST? Is it sticking for ages during scanning hardware, or is it Windows actually loading that's taking the time? You should get rid of Win 98 and get XP Pro or Win 2000 really, Win 98 based OS' (including Win ME) are software's equivalent of Rover cars: they go ok at first, but after a few months they become unreliable. I run XP Pro and i can't remember the last time i had to hit the reset button, it must be months ago. Perhaps j2buttonsw can shed some light on things, without a bit more information on the disk setup i'm afraid i'm not sure what's causing the problem.

[bluedolphin]

If you have gazillions of fonts on your computer that slows the boot up while they load.

[j2buttonsw]

I'm with cactus: if you have pulled the HDD from one system and dumped it into another, ideally you should do a clean installation of Windows 98. The problem may be that Windows 98 is loading unnecessary drivers on boot up which is making it slow. How much free space have you on your drive? Windows 98 still pages files from memory to the hard disk and if your hard drive is full then this will really slow the machine down on boot. This can be remedied by manually decreasing the virtual memory. If it is the only hard drive then slave/master doesn't matter that much. Use disk cleanup and defrag for good housekeeping as they both will improve performance - as will running Norton Utilities. As for an upgrade, I am in the Windows 2000 camp despite it becoming very unfashionable.

[zconcptcod]

Thanks for the info cactus & j2buttonsw. There is only one Hard drive with Win98 as the primary partition & Win2000 as another partition. I am going to delete the win2000 partition and install XP over win 98. Is it safe to install xp over 98 and does it matter if the file system is fat or ntfs? I kept 98 as I found certain games wouldnt work on win2000. Thanks again.

[j2buttonsw]

You can upgrade Windows 98 to XP (over-installing) but I would advise you back your data up and do a clean installation. This will prevent you carrying over any legacy issues you had with 98 and causing potential incompatability problems. XP is hyped as the next best thing and is popular with gamers (all the video card bench tests give the best results under XP). I, however, have found that with the latest video card drivers and (most importantly) the newest DirectX, there hasn't been a game I can't play on Windows 2000. NTFS is the best file system to use as it is the most efficient and has all of the security features. If you were thinking of changing Windows 2000 for XP and keeping Windows 98, then I would suggest FAT32 - only because Windows 98 can't read an NTFS partition.