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If, like I had on one of my PCs, you have a 3min+ or slower boot time where Windows XP seems to sit for 2+ or so minutes with the XP logo doing nothing before everything comes to life then do the following.
Download Bootvis from www.microsoft.com and run it the next time you boot. Do a 'Trace'
If it shows a very long 'HDD init' time of minutes rather than seconds then this is how to fix it.
This example assumes you have 1 Hard drive on your primary IDE channel and a DVD-ROM(or CD)
and CD-R on your two secondary IDE channels.
Go to start > right click on my computer > click properties. Click Hardware > Device Manager.
Go to IDE/ATAPI Controllers. Select primary channel. Right click properties. Click the Advance settings tab. Then on the device (0 or 1)that does not have 'device type' greyed out select 'disable' instead of 'autodetect'. This should stop windows trying to find a drive that isn't there.
If you have your IDE channels set up differently simply repat the above for the secondary IDE channel settings.
When I did this my boot time went from 3mins 20 to 35 seconds.
It is also good to keep in mind that the more devices (mainly PCI cards) you install, the slower XP starts up. I'm not sure if this happens on a fresh new install, but my computer (which is definitely a more than decent machine) takes forever to start up and I have 2 SATA HDDs, 2 IDE burners, 1 7900GT, firewire, a TV/FM tuner, PCMCIA controller, PCI-E wifi card, 7.1 sound card, and a VFD (vacuum flourescent display). I'm not talking about my actual desktop to start up, I'm talking about the loading screen. Thats a lot of stuff for Windows to load, and after changing hardware so much without making a new install, I'm bound to get startup performance issues.