Any idea why the computers take so long to boot up with them hooked to a network? Using XP on two comps at home (temporarily) and both set to autodetect the IPs, etc etc (DHCP) but the load time is phenominal!!!

Any way to speed these bastards up?

what is providing the DHCP? router? ISP?
If they are having to negoiate their IPs I takes longer than a static IP

Is PPPOE involved? That slows things down by up to 60 seconds even with a router involved in some instances.

They're just two joe-generic comps hooked to a switch each access the internet alone, no router...

Are they searching for mapped drives when booting : Tools, Folder Options, Automatically search for network attached folders and printers

Yes, there were issues with that I read about at Microsoft's support site. They even published a patch for that did they not? I'll try to find it again....

Yep they are looking for shared drives, and printers... it slows it that much?!

If you don't have any don't let it search for them.

also in general disabling the IDE channels in XP via the device manager will speed things up....i remember my comp used to take ~ 1 min to start up.....it was because of this.

I'd assign them static IP's and put the Boot Vis to them

Both XP's here boot in under 30 seconds, getting IP's from the router.... (Long lease time helps...)
I dont MAP any drives but do share two printers and 3 or 4 folders on each machine. I thought that stuff is cached anyway... I never get a flashlight in network neighbourhood.

Put the BootVis to em and have it Optimize startup...
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/hwdev/platfo...ot/bootvis.mspx

What type of NIC cards do you have in both your machines?

one comp has an edimax nic and the other has a surecom.

I bootvis one of the comp no prob but the other bluescreened

assigning them static IPs should do the trick from what i read on the net. Thanks for the help guys.

Manny, did you find that patch? Anything to cut boot time

Odie,

Very Slow boot when networking

Slow network access not always due to Scheduled tasks check

read this as well

Slow Network Browsing