Ok so Im upgrading my old system for my sister and brother-in-law for an early christmas gift. My bro-in-law made the horrible mistake of buying a Gateway Astro a few years ago and needless to say its been a complete nightmare for him. Anyways on to my problem. The system runs really really slow during start-up. Takes about 1-2 minutes to get Windows to come up. After I am in windows, its not as fast as I had anticipated it being. Here are the specs: AMD Athalon 750mhz processor (Slot A - looks like an old atari cartridge) A-Open motherboard (New) Maxtor 80gb HD @ 7200 rpm 256mb PC 133 SDRAM W98 I put another stick of 256, but it made no difference whatsoever. I was thinking the hard drive is too big, but Im not really sure because its brand new and has nothing loaded on it. Maybe I need a faster processor to keep up with the massive hard drive. Any suggestions??
I'm not a BIOS expert, but it might be trying to search for hardware instances and is taking a long time to do it. If toggling the plug & play features in the BIOS is possible, you might want to try that. As for Win98, remove everything from the Startup folder and check all of the "services" running. Make sure there is are no unnecessary things running. If you're not sure about the processes running, do a Google Groups search...I usually check there for what the processes actually are (since their names are usually pretty cryptic). HTH!
Gateway Astro sounds like something from the Jetsons. The specs seem like the computer should be fairly quick esp. w/ all the ram...
Sorry...when you first boot up your computer, you'll usually see something that says hit F10 or F8 (or whatever key) to enter setup. This should take you into the BIOS setup. Usually, the BIOS setup is a menu driven program that will allow you to check out the settings on your motherboard. I believe most of the newer motherboards (< 3 years old) should have some sort of setting regarding whether or not your motherboard is capable of plug & play. I can remember in the past that people used to have Windows problems when this setting was enabled. See if you can get into the BIOS setup and move around through the different settings. Another thing that will slow down your boot up is a BIOS setting regarding the boot device sequence. In the good old days (early - mid 90's), most systems would check the floppy drive as a bootable device. These days, its best to set your hard drive to be the first boot device (as opposed to the floppy or cdrom drive). Check these things out and if you have any further questions...post and maybe we can help your boot up speed!
