My PC (p4 XP SP2) is just refusing to boot at the moment, it goes through every pre OS boot check OK but can spend hours at the black Windows XP loadup screen and then even more hours at the blue welcome screen without actually getting to a log in. Managed to get it to boot yesterday by doing a logged startup, but this morning nothings working, any ideas anyone?

Will do, though the one time it did boot up (yesterday) everything worked fine.

I had this problem - turned out something had gone weird with my usb ports. Unplugged my usb devices and rebooted. All was fine.

If it's not the USB ports, try uninstalling the video card drivers, rebooting, then reinstalling the with latest version of the drivers. I've had XP boot up slowly in the past due to a duff video driver

If unplugging USB devices doesn't solve it, start searching the Windows knowledge base and googling for tips on "troubleshooting slow bootup in windows XP". There are a bunch of different diagnostic procedures you can do.

Here's the procedure I'd use in your situation...

1. Assume for the sake of diagnostics that the problem is a SINGLE service or device driver that's causing the computer to boot slowlly.

2. During bootup, press the F8 key as soon as the BIOS is done loading and the OS begins to load from the hard disk. This will give you the windows boot options screen.

3. Choose "Enable Boot Logging" and let it boot. It will start writing every driver load into a log file.

4. Because stupid microsoft doesn't put time-stamps on the lines in the boot log, you have no way of knowing which one of those lines is the slow one unless you do the following....

5. While Windows is booting, you will hear its hard drive working as it loads various things up. When it reaches the point WHERE IT IS SILENT FOR A LONG TIME because there's a failing device driver, press the computer's reset button.

6. Let Windows boot normally this time.

7. Open up c:\windows\ntbtlog.txt and find out where it died.

8. Then start trying to figure out WHY that particular thing died. Perhaps it's just something you can remove.

Thanks, I wondered where the bootlog was...

I'm hoping its the USB though because I know somethings changed there, anything else is going to be much more troublesome.

Also, try and find a copy of Bootvis, which was a MS utility that times each device driver at bootup so you can see which one is holding things up

It was a USB memory stick that caused my problems. PC would not boot and I couldn't figure it out. Happened to glance at the back of the PC and the fault lights were lit up (its a Dell PC). Took out the stick and all was fine except the memory stick doesn't work anymore I can write to it but the data is all corrupted. I'm bloody annoyed cos it was a 2gb sony one but at least its nothing I did to it! It was just sitting in a drawer. Wonder what happened to it

Yeah, I'd find a mac and try reformatting the flash drive. Every six months a cow-orker hands me his flash drive and I reformat it in the mac mini. His windows box won't even see the thing, the mac reformats it and works in everything for the next six months.

Matthew

Tried it on 3 PCs (one of them had worked flawlessly with the stick a month ago) and still nothing. I could format, write and read existing data - a few word docs - but anything new I added just coudn't be read. It was just... strange. Can the chips just die?

I don't know that much about whether the chips can die or not, but if you can see some semblance of a drive when it's hooked up you should be able to mess about with it in any number of drive utilities.
Haven't ever had to do so myself, but I've heard of it being done.

I just learned a whole lot from this 'flash drive roundup' article: it's 28 pages long!
(no answers there to your questions, but a good intro to the guts of flash drives for the likes of me)

Yup, the chips can and will die. Flash memory has a limited number of write cycles. You can read it as much as you want, but you can only write to it a couple hundred thousand times. They may be up to millions these days, with inflation as it is.

Matthew

Not the USB

I'll try the other stuff over the weekend

Thanks Boxer, will definitely go down the Freeview route but haven't had time yet as I'll probably build a new quiet system for that.

I've just added a slave unit to mine and are thinking of spending £50 on another one, you can record a bewildering number of programmes simultaneously: The manufacturers tell me that they've got 12 going at once. I have it linked to digiguide, so that I just click on a programme to record it each week. I've also got a video editing package called Videoredo (I know there are lots of these about and this is not free), which is faster and easier to use for cutting out the commercials than others I've tried.