Slow boot up on Dell screen

Hi all,

I spent quite a bit of time doing a fresh install and optimising vista and was down to ~35 sec startup time. For some reason though, my startup is slowing to 90 secs. The Dell startup BIOS A08 screen is particularly slow. It stops for a while (10 secs) just before the bar gets to completion. It seems like it's frozen, then the DVD drive (Optiarc) makes the power check noise, and startup continiues slowly.

I've tried defragging the bootfiles again and defragging the gard drive, but has only got very slightly quicker. One thing which might be causing this is that the system deosn't seem to go into standby when the battery dies. When I restart, the black option screen shows an option to Continue System Resume. It then shows the boot screen for quite a while showing the load bar. I did disable hibernate, but reactivated to see if it solved this but without success.

Any ideas? Any advice appreciated!

I'm running Vista Home Premium btw.

 

I have the same problem with Dell Inspiron 1520 running Windows XP (uninstalled Vista Premium). I think its because my Toshiba DVD/RW died, its not reading/writing not even opening, and in the Dell's Diagnosys its says Error code 2000-0147. I think the slow bios boot its related with this hardware thats not working properly.

Sorry for my bad English.

 

Strange... my 1330 did this the very first time I powered it up pulling it out of the box on delivery day. It was a very long "Dell bootup" screen. Since then it's been quick like normal.

 

ok.. i dont remmeber the exact steps, cause i have to reboot and find out..
but it something like
"startup post screen" --> minimal boot or auto (so ram is only checked if somethings changed)
"boot devices order" ---> Hard disk then CD. (will check the harddrive before trying to boot the CD)
should speed things up quite a bit..

 

Ya that's just the 'extended' boot that you get on the first boot or when settings have changed (like getting a new BIOS). Basically, its checking memory before it tries to boot the OS.

All you need to do it boot into the BIOS and poke around for the 'boot settings'. You would want to set it to 'fast boot' - 'turbo' or whatever. Anything that indicates speed. That will shut off the extended memory check and speed up boot time significantly.