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WinXP Home Taking a while to load
Hi there,
For a little over a week now, WinXP seems to be taking a lot longer to load than usual. It used to be around 20-30 seconds big max but now it's close to a minute. The hard disc seems to be working like crazy when loads up as if there was a ton of software loading in the background. The thing is that nothing new has been done recently and below you will see all that I have done with no real improvement. Added to that, which could and is likely related. I've been getting a bit of stuttering issue with my graphic card (ATI 9600XT 256MB), which, obviously, is causing also an issue with the audio.
I don't have the best system out there, but it's decent enough and I'm very happy with it. I never had to complain but with the stuttering issue and with the long loading time, i'm wondering what the heck is going on. I have not installed or un-installed anything prior to the issue. I've had this card since November 2004 and the rest of the computer (self built) for almost two years and never had a problem with it until now. Taking examples, I play eq2 or anything heavy textured games, I will get this problem. However, even simplier things such as viewing a movie trailer online will have the same issue.
So when I do play games with textures (we'll take the eq2 example again), when encountering a heavy object or other moving objects, the hard drive light goes wild and you can hear the hard drive working like crazy (swapping?). What is causing this?
Before you start telling me I need more ram, please....I've been running on the same specs, and same customization on games since November with no problems at all. What changed that made this problem appear. I had drivers from ATI dating from November it was the first thing I thought though I had doubts in my head that it would do anything. Indeed I updated to Catalyste 5.2 and I think it made it worse so I reverted back my old drivers. My latest tests are on Omega drivers which aren't solving the problem which means, probably not a driver issue either.
Things I have done to try to resolve the issue:
-Defrag
-Ran Norton Antivirus
-Ran Spybot
-Ran TuneUp Utilities 2004 and cleaned, cleaned, cleaned
-Ran msconfig
-Ran services.msc and cleaned again
-Ran events log....no issues
-Ran dx tests which resulted in a super-fast garbled rotating X-Box, which is something that had never happened before.
-Updated sound drivers
-Checked card heat as well as cpu heat and that is all good.
Sorry if this isn't strickly WinXp related but I think both issues are related somehow. Any ideas? Thx all.
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