Almost boots, but not quite

I have been doing maintenance on a very flaky, slow, Dell Vostro with XP. (See my threads on "Born slow and getting slower" and "D4300 driver needed"). Going from the original 512MB RAM to 2 GB made it noticeably less slow; removing a few programs from the startup list helped a bit more.

But this afternoon, I noticed boot time had increased, and I was seeing new phenomena:
After the Dell Splash screen, "Boot from CD" appeared briefly on the top right, then all was black for a while, then the Windows logo and splash screen gradually became visible, first as shades of gray, eventually in full colors. Windows seemed normal (at least for this machine) after that.

But this evening, the Windows logo never comes up to full brightness. The Dell splash screen came up within seconds, went off promptly, and the "Boot from CD" flicked on and off, all within 2 min. or less. The dim Win logo appeared 6 minutes after I started the reboot, and has progressed no further in the 25 minutes since.

Last thing I did before the reboot was to remove and reinstall Norton 360, which said I had to reboot to get updates, so (alas!) I did. But I'm pretty sure the dim Win logo happened earlier today, before I did the Norton stuff.

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Tried Last Known Good Configuration, and it loaded and ran, but the Windows Logo is still gradually fading in from black. Boot took >5 minutes

 

Hello Oldmaven,

The tips below are not my work. I found them on various sites dealing with XP boot problems.

If windows hangs at the loading screen it is probably hung on a custom driver. If you can get in safe mode, great, run msconfig and under "BOOT.INI" select the option "/NOGUIBOOT" under boot options and restart. You should see a list of drivers being loaded instead of the normal Windows logo. When it freezes, take note of what driver is trying to be loaded, then use google to look it up. It most likely corresponds to a third party program that you should uninstall.

Another thing you can try is to disconnect all peripherals during boot. It's a very slim chance but worth trying - I have seen this work before when XP showed the symptoms you describe.

Does it always stop at the same point? If not the problem might be something else. I had one PC (with XP) that got stuck occasionally on the loading screen, the problem then got more frequent and it finally started to stop at different points immediately after turning on at the BIOS screen. In this case the motherboard died, a new motherboard sorted the problem in this case.

This is my work. Dell machines are fairly bulletproof. From what I read above the problem could be with a video driver. Just put a full description of your machine into a search engine (Google or whatever) and put video drivers after the machine details. Hopefully you will get several pages of sites (especially Dell) offering drivers. Stick to the Dell sites and good luck.

Regards,

Mark. (Aunty Jack).